Frabjous Day!

About a decade ago, as I was reading items for inclusion in this here blogspace, I ran across a phrase I enjoy typing almost as much as I enjoy saying aloud: quark-gluon plasma. It's the term for a superhot substance theorized to have existed very shortly after the Big Bang, before quarks and gluons cooled enough to form the building blocks of atomic nuclei, such as protons.

Over those years, it's been created in labs and in experiments, but the idea that it would ever exist "in the wild," so to speak, seemed unlikely. The Big Bang is called a singularity for the reason that it happened only once. And as much fun as I think it would be to have actual quark-gluon plasma in the universe, I'm not really keen on the idea of destroying everything that exists in order to repeat the Big Bang and make that happen.

Comes now Professor Luciano Rezzola reporting on experiments done by physicists at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in which we find that the collision of neutron stars may produce quark-gluon plasma. Such collisions produce gravitational waves, theorized for many years but first detected in 2017. Simulations of those collisions show scientists what might be happening when the two ultra-dense neutron stars slam into each other. One such simulation produces my fave-rave plasma as a result, and creates gravitational waves that behave a certain way.

If future gravitational waves act that way, then the chances are very great that the neutron star collisions produce either quark-gluon plasma or something that has almost the exact same effects. Yes, the substance is super-hot and would probably destroy the world if enough of it was produced, but persons with an eye on current events need not worry. Though the crania of both probable major-party presidential nominees are indeed dense, they are not nearly as dense as neutron stars and we need fear only ordinary catastrophes when they meet for debates later this year.