"Exploring the Quark Core: The Enigmatic Interior of Massive Neutron Stars"
A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that the densest neutron stars, with masses greater than two solar masses, have an 80-90% likelihood of containing quark cores—a bizarre state of matter. This finding was derived using Bayesian statistics on observational data of neutron stars' mass and size, rather than solely relying on the complex Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) equation. The study indicates that the most massive neutron stars may transition from dense neutron matter to a quark matter core, a hypothesis that could be further confirmed with additional data on neutron stars' mass and radius in the future.