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Published online 30 November 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.292

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Splitting the quark

If quarks are made of preons, then stars made of the stuff should be detectable.

Philip Ball

Are there pea-sized objects as heavy as the Moon out there in space? Perhaps so, if quarks, the constituent particles of atoms, are themselves made up of still smaller particles.

Fredrik Sandin and Johan Hansson of Luleå University of Technology in Sweden say that these hypothetical particles, called preons, might exist in super-dense chunks left over from the beginning of the Universe.

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