Quark soup may cause cosmic flashes

Intense flashes of gamma rays in far-off galaxies might be produced by a bizarre kind of star, consisting of phenomenally dense material in which the particles that make up atomic nuclei have fallen apart.
...But within days of posting their paper on the arXiv preprint server¹, the researchers were given good reason to believe that they are on to something. Davide Lazzati of the University of Colorado at Boulder contacted Paczyski to say that the quark-star hypothesis might explain some puzzling observations made by the Burst and Transient Source Experiment on NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, which was launched in 1991.