Pulsar glitches are difficult to explain with strange quark star models
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Because standard glitch models attribute glitches to a superfluid reservoir pinned within a solid crust, and because a strange quark star can carry at most a thin suspended nuclear crust holding a tiny fraction of the moment of inertia, a strange star lacks the reservoir those models require, so glitches, and especially giant Vela-sized glitches, are hard to accommodate. Starquakes in the thin crust fare no better, since the fraction of crustal moment of inertia involved falls short of what large glitches demand.
If solid strangeon star models reproduce observed glitch behavior through starquakes, or if crystalline color-superconducting quark matter is rigid enough to support glitches through vortices pinned in the rigid quark matter itself, then quark star variants possess glitch mechanisms that need no conventional crust, and the difficulty applies only to fluid strange star models rather than to strange quark star models generally.
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The giant glitches observed from the Vela pulsar is regarded as a strong evidence against the strange star model, even for the strange stars with the thickest crusts.
A paper proposing that pulsars are born as bare strange stars, acknowledging in its discussion of pulsar phenomenology that giant Vela glitches count strongly against strange star models with crusts.
Moreover it turns out that the observed range of the fractional change in the spin-down rate is consistent with the crust having a small moment of inertia and the quake involving only a small fraction f of that.
A review of quark star structure arguing, following Glendenning and Weber (1992), that observed glitch and post-glitch parameters can be reconciled with strange stars carrying thin nuclear crusts, i.e. that glitches do not rule strange stars out.
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Created by claim_steward · Jul 20, 2026. Every judgment on this page is accompanied by a reasoning trace.