Evidence for Condensed Quark Matter in the Solar System

T. Marshall Eubanks1, Bruce Bills2

1 2

Asteroid Initiatives LLC, 7243 Archlaw Drive, Clifton, Va 20124, USA

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, Ca 91109, USA To whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail:tme@asteroidinitiatives.com.

Macroscopic quark matter nuggets are a viable explanation for dark matter, with a wide range of nugget masses being consistent with current cosmological, astrophysical and terrestrial constraints. This presentation will describe the confrontation of a particular nugget dark matter theory, the Compact Composite Objects (CCOs), with Solar System observations. Our results show that these objects would be important in the formation of the planetary system, that this would result in a relic CCO population in the Solar System today, and that the CCO masses predicted for these relics are consistent with the observed rotational dynamics of some small Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) (1). CCOs, nuggets of dense Color-Flavor Locked (CFL) superconducting quark matter, would be created at the Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD) phase transition roughly 10 microseconds after cosmic ination, and thus would provide a natural explanation of the near equality of the dark and ordinary matter cosmological densities, and potentially also an explanation for the cosmological baryon asymmetry. The theory of their creation during the collapse of axion domain walls, as proposed by Zhitnitsky and his colleagues (2, 3), makes 1

specic predictions of the allowed CCO mass range, with stable masses constrained to be between 105 and 4 1010 kg. Even though CCOs would be able to interact with ordinary matter, they can fulll the various astrophysical and cosmological constraints on dark matter due to their very high mass-area ratios and large binding energies. CCOs would be a form of Warm Dark Matter (WDM), initially coupled to the radiation uid but decoupling sufciently early to fulll all existing constraints on WDM. A relatively small fraction (order one part per million) of any dark matter present in a molecular cloud would be captured in the course of the formation of planetary systems such as the Solar System (4). These captured CCOs would serve as planetesimal nucleation centers, helping to form protoplanetesimals and resolve the meter barrier issue of planetary formation, which would result in a relic population of CCOs residing today in the cores of the Sun, planets and asteroids. Such CCOs would be especially easy to detect inside strange asteroids, small bodies (with radii < roughly 200 meters) with quark matter cores surrounded by mantles of rock or ice. Small strange asteroids, bound gravitationally by their relatively massive cores, would able to be spun up to very high rotation rates, by collisions or by by radiation pressure torques, before disruption. A population of fast rotating small asteroids is indeed found requiring (if gravitationally bound) core masses of 1010 kg, at the upper end of the stable mass range predicted by the axion domain wall CCO theory. The agreement between the CCO mass range predicted from cosmology and fundamental physics and the asteroid core mass estimates determined from completely independent Solar System data is not yet sufcient to prove the 2

existence of strange asteroids, but should motivate further consideration of the CCO hypothesis, both theoretically and observationally. Conrmation or refutation of the CCO hypothesis is likely to be obtained from solar system data, both from modeling of the formation of the solar system, and direct observation of candidate strange asteroids, passively in the optical and infrared, and actively by radar. If this hypothesis is conrmed it is reasonable to assume that direct examination of macroscopic quark matter will be achievable by spacecraft within the next few decades.

References and Notes

1. T. Marshall Eubanks. Quark Matter in the Solar System : Evidence for a Game-Changing Space Resource. Submitted to Acta Astronautica for publication in 2014, 2014. 2. Ariel Zhitnitsky. Dark matter as dense color superconductor. In Nuclear Physics B Proceedings Supplements, volume 124, pages 99102, July 2003. 3. K. Lawson and A. R. Zhitnitsky. Quark (Anti) Nugget Dark Matter. In Cosmic Frontier Workshop (CF3 and CF6 groups), SLAC 2013. Snowmass 2013 e-Proceedings, May 2013. 4. F. Capela, M. Pshirkov, and P. Tinyakov. Constraints on primordial black holes as dark matter candidates from star formation. Phys. Rev. D, 87(2):023507, January 2013.