Some aspects of strangeness in astrophysics and cosmology Original Research Article

It has been suggested that strange quark matter may constitute the absolute ground state of Quantum Chromodynamics. Weak interaction plays a very important role in this scenario. For physical processes where the time scales are long enough to accomodate weak interaction, strange quark matter may indeed be formed. Such situations occur in the interior of cold stars as well as in the phase transition separating the quark-gluon and the hadronic phases in the primordial universe. We show that the occurrence of primordial strange quark matter can explain the cosmological cold dark matter in a natural way, without having to introduce any new physics beyond the standard model. Evidence for such matter may already have been found in astrophysical observations.