Are primordial quark nuggets hiding among the asteroids?

Jorge Horvath from the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil seems to think so and believes that our current search for near Earth asteroids may uncover them.

Here is his thinkin’. About 20 years ago, a number of physicists investigated the possibility that a quark gluon plasma–a state of matter that should only have existed in the earliest instants of the universe–could become frozen and preserved. But how long would it survive?

Nobody knows how quickly this stuff boils away but plenty of estimates suggest there ought to be nuggets of this stuff floating round the universe today. Many of these nugggets should be about as massive as an asteroid but obviously much smaller because of their huge density.

Horvath has calculated that if these quark nuggets were captured by the Sun, there should be more than 10 million of them in orbit right now, adding several times the mass of the Earth.

So how to find them. Horvath says they should be perfect reflectors of optical light and so although speck-like in size, should look about as bright an ordinary asteroid (ie not very bright). But being perfect reflectors, the light should show the characteristic spectra of the Sun rather than an asteorid. They could also be identified by their vanishing occultation times.

All this, of course, assumes that the nuggets are clean and not surrounded by ordinary matter. That seems unlikely to me.

My guess is that if these things are out there, they’re gonna be covered with all kinds of muck. Does that mean that primordial quark nuggets could seed the formation of objects like comets and planets? Now there’s a thought.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0803.1795: The search for Primordial Quark Nuggets among Near Earth Asteroids