The birth of strange stars: kinetics, hydrodynamics and phenomenology of supernovae and GRBs

TL;DR

This paper reviews the role of strange quark matter in supernovae and related explosions, focusing on flame propagation, instabilities, magnetic effects, and the conditions favoring rapid conversion to strange stars.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the turbulent and detonation regimes of combustion in dense stellar environments, emphasizing magnetic field effects and classification of explosive phenomena.

Findings

Short conversion timescales are favored, with velocities much larger than laminar speeds.

Turbulent Rayleigh-Taylor and distributed regimes dominate the burning process.

Magnetic fields significantly influence flame stability and propagation.

Abstract

We present a short review of strange quark matter in supernovae and related explosions, with particular attention to the issue of the propagation of the combustion in the dense stellar environment. We discuss the instabilities affecting the flame and present some new results of application to the turbulent regime. The transition to the distributed regime and further deflagration-to-detonation mechanism are addressed. Finally we show that magnetic fields may be important for this problem, because they modify the flame through the dispersion relations which characterize the instabilities. A tentative classification of explosive phenomena according to the value of the average local magnetic field affecting the burning and the type of stellar system in which this conversion is taking place is presented. As a general result, we conclude that "short" conversion timescales are always favored, since the burning falls in either the turbulent Rayleigh-Taylor (or even the distributed) regime, or perhaps in the detonation one. In both cases the velocity is several orders of magnitude larger than $v_{lam}$, and therefore the latter is irrelevant in practice for this problem. Interesting perspectives for the study of this problem are still open and important issues need to be addressed.