Are Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Coming From the Collapse of Strange Star Crusts?

The study, titled "Fast Radio Bursts from the collapse of Strange Star Crusts", recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal. The team was led by Yue Zhang of the  School of Astronomy and Space Science (SASC) at Nanjing University and included Jin-Jun Geng and Yong-Feng Huang - a postdoc and professor from the SASC and the Key Laboratory of Modern Astronomy and Astrophysics (also at Nanjing University), respectively.

"It has been conjectured that strange quark matter (SQM), a kind of dense material composed of approximately equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, may have a lower energy per baryon than ordinary nuclear matter (such as 56 Fe) so that it may be the true ground state of hadronic matter. If this hypothesis is correct, then neutron stars (NSs) may actually be 'strange stars'".