What If Strange Matter Hit Earth? | Unveiled

What If Strange Matter Hit Earth?

As creatures of Earth, we’re constantly wary of anything entering our atmosphere. Stray asteroids, for example, have caused mass extinctions before. But there’s something else that could impact Earth, as well. Something unusual because we’re not actually certain it exists… but if it does exist, then it could be far more dangerous than even the biggest asteroid imaginable.

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if strange matter hit Earth?

When we talk about strange matter, what exactly are we referring to? Ordinary matter is all the everyday stuff. All materials, substances, people, animals, planets, and moons… they’re all formed from ordinary matter. And if you zoom in close enough, you’ll find that everything is made up of atoms. The building blocks of life, the universe and everything. But, if we go even deeper, to the subatomic level, eventually we get to the fundamentals of strange matter.

Regular atoms consist of protons, neutrons and electrons, but these too can be broken down into even smaller pieces including quarks… which are the most elementary particles we know of, along with leptons. There are six known types of quark - up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. Regular matter ordinarily makes use of only the two most stable quark types - the up and down quarks. The others decay far too quickly to register. We could say, then, that all the matter in the observable universe is formed by only two out of the possible six quarks available.

Strange matter is different to the norm, though, because it’s thought to be made up of three types of quark. The up and down as usual and, you guessed it, the strange. Strange quarks are believed to be less common in the universe, mostly because it takes extremely high energy interactions for them to form. Theories abound, however, that they do still exist en masse. And most probably in the heart of extremely dense neutron stars - with neutron stars being among the densest objects we know about in space, besides black holes. It’s thought that inside the core of some neutron stars, strange quarks take hold and spread. This happens until all the quarks within that core converge into strange matter. A most mysterious substance. In this case, we can refer to the neutron star as a quark star, but also as a strange star.

At this point it’s important to remember that we haven’t yet confirmed the existence of such a star anywhere in the universe. These are theorised objects, but they’re not total science fiction, either. The suggestion that they do exist is rooted in our understanding of how the subatomic world works, and in what we believe the early universe was like, when it’s proposed that strange quarks might’ve been far more prevalent just after the Big Bang.

Regardless, what’s important for today’s question is that if strange matter does exist today, even if it’s only in the cores of neutron stars, then there’s the real potential for absolute disaster everywhere else. Strange matter has been variously labelled the most dangerous substance in the universe, and here’s why.

Theoretically, strange matter can do what other matter can’t and transform anything it touches into strange matter. In a sense, it infects regular matter, setting off a chain reaction that alters the physical world at a fundamental level. That’s why it’s dangerous. The somewhat vague scientific consensus as to why this might happen is that strange matter could also be the ideal state of matter. Its stability, predictability, energy needs, and density all amount to it being ultra-efficient. In general, regular matter also strives to be in its most efficient state, which is why predictions claim it would swiftly try to emulate strange matter if it ever encountered it.

So, now consider what could happen if strange matter was let loose across the universe. Any star, planet, moon, asteroid or lifeform it met, could find itself inescapably transformed. Rearranged at the quark level. Although, much depends on how it’s charged (and more on that later!).

Small amounts of strange matter are called strangelets, and it’s these that most fuel this particular astronomical nightmare. It’s hypothesised that strangelets could leak out of a neutron star, perhaps during a massive, neutron star collision. In the grand scheme of space, strangelets are small and unnoticeable. But we’d certainly know all about it if even just one arrived on Earth. It could theoretically move through our planet, converting (and naturally condensing) everything before it, leaving our world much smaller than it was and totally without life. It’s not entirely clear how quickly this could all happen, but some estimates claim that it would be over before we’d even realised it had begun. One second, we’re living our everyday, regular matter lives… the next we’ve been fundamentally restructured!

So, what possible defence could we mount against such a threat? And how likely is it that strange matter will ever come to Earth? One glint of hope is that, according to some theories, if strange matter is also positively charged (as it is suspected to be) then it could be repelled by Earth before it can do any damage. So, perhaps the end of the world isn’t nigh? But ultimately, we are at the mercy of physics here. And our understanding of strange matter is still very limited. If it really can transform anything it touches into itself, and it ever did arrive on Earth, then unfortunately no amount of doomsday prepping could save us. Even the underground bunkers that we so stereotypically run to during disaster events… would dissolve all around us.

As for how likely it is that strange matter could descend on our planet, scientists aren’t completely sure. As we said, strangelets are thought to be small, and they could be very rare… making it very unlikely that strange matter and Earth would ever cross paths. But, at the other end of the spectrum, it’s also been hypothesized that strangelets, small as they might be, aren’t rare at all… and could even contribute to the mass of one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy, dark matter. If this were to prove to be the case, then we have good reason to be seriously concerned… given that dark matter is thought to make up around a quarter of the known universe.

For now, it should be said that scientists aren’t that concerned, so you can rest assured that the strange apocalypse probably isn’t going to happen tomorrow. It’s just that if it did happen, we’d almost certainly be doomed. And what’s unlikely to make anybody feel any better about the situation is that we could potentially create strange matter right here on Earth, as well, according to some stories.

Around the year 2000, for example, there was some public anxiety relating to the switching on of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, otherwise known as the RHIC, at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state. The RHIC is a particle accelerator, similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. And (as was the case with the Large Hadron Collider, too) it was tagged with various doomsday prophecies when it started operations. Including that the scientists using it might accidently produce strange matter, thereby risking the future of Earth.

Fast forward to today, though, and in more than two decades’ worth of use the RHIC still hasn’t produced a single strangelet… and the odds that it ever would do have been calculated as being more than a one-in-fifty-million chance. So, again, we can all rest easy. It’s almost certain that nothing will go drastically wrong with our reality today, tomorrow or next week. And, hey, we do actually have one readymade solution if strange matter was ever detected (and somehow contained) - cast it off into a black hole. Black holes devour all forms of matter without discrimination, so they could stop even strange matter in its tracks. Admittedly, quite how we’d go about dumping anything into a black hole… is something we haven’t worked out how to do yet. But hopefully it’ll never come to that, anyway!

In general, strange matter is, well, strange. It’s still a huge unknown in science and has never been directly observed. Growing numbers of psychists are confident that it does exist, though. Somewhere. Most probably deep within the core of the densest neutron stars. It may never escape that environment… and, if it does, it may never reach us. But if a single strangelet came to our particular planet, and the conditions were just right for it to do its thing, then we could all be quark soup before we know it. And that’s what would happen if strange matter hit Earth.