Ripheus23

Gluon star story idea(ish)

So, I was imagining how a gluon star might exist. You'd apparently need a lot of gluons. I don't know if talk of boson stars usually has much to do with this option, though since gluons can form glueballs (which I will for the rest of this post refer to as gluonium) which have mass, it seems possible to me for enough gluons to be massed together to form a gravitationally self-bound star-structure (or whatever).

Now, if this is so, as such, it does mean it's gluonium, technically, that's making up the star. So, how does that work? The base is the fact (or assumed fact) that gluons, because they have and carry color charge, unlike light which carries but does not have an electric charge, can be charge-bound together as long as the whole unitary structure is color-neutral. So, for the sake of my story idea, so to say, let's say that there is an ascending series of gluonium types (gluon complexes) that corresponds masswise somehow to the ascending order of quarks and leptons or whatever, so that gluonium can form into atom- and chemical-like structures. For the sake of simplicity, let's work with hypothetical gluonic hydrogen (let's call it "strong hydrogen," on an analogy with the term "heavy water"). Granted the required gravitational pressures, then, a gluon star consisting primarily of strong hydrogen should (hypothetically...?) undergo an analogical regime of stellar nucleosynthesis.

The articles I've read on these subjects include one that talked about something called "gluon fusion" that is used in Higgs-boson runs. I think the temperatures I saw listed as required for this were like 1 trillion to 4 trillion (I think 7 trillion is the maximum they've gotten?). Now gluonium is supposed to be unstable, I believe, like it collapses/decays/cools down/w/e really fast (like fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds fast), so let's suppose the star needs a constant temperature of about 1 trillion degrees, to stabilize the gluonium overall, so the core of the star puts off the required heat and keeps the rest of the gluonium in a plasma-like state (or whatever state is analogous to what the sun's heat keeps itself in). Now, at the edge of the gluonium plasma (glagma!), maybe the exotic mass cools down and decays into other particles. One decay product of gluon fusion itself is apparently Higgs bosons, so if it were possible to detect either a Higgs boson wave as coming off a star or not, or if a star was internally being altered by the presence of a large enough number of Higgs bosons, or whatever, we might have one test for whether a star is a gluon star or not. But also I think gluons can decay into quarks, or gluonium can, so maybe there'd also be a thin sphere-ish layer of pure quark matter at the edge of the star's "atmosphere".

Now I would guess that this star would be super-bright, but I wonder how long it would last. Apparently, boson stars of some kind are relevant to the question of how an active galactic nucleus works (I think the evidence is that they're not the core cause of the phenomenon, but related nevertheless), so they ought to be exceptionally bright in any event, so maybe weirdly bright stars would be candidates for these. (Or: some quasars are gluon stars, or who knows...) So maybe there's that reason to think they'll exist for a long time. But if gluonium decays quickly (or quickly enough?), I think there's a chance they wouldn't last very "long," for a star at least. Let's say they only exist for a few years at most?