What would happen if the earth was struck by a substantial amount of quark matter

We would die

Hello Teddy

What do you refer to with "a substantial amount of quark matter"??
All matter is quark matter. The question is how much...
One thousand quarks? One million quarks? One Billion quarks? One Trillion quarks? One gram quarks? :)

Hello Teddy

What do you refer to with "a substantial amount of quark matter" ???
All matter is quark matter. The question is how much ....
One thousand quarks? One million quarks? One Billion quarks? One Trillion quarks? One gram quarks? :)

I disagree that all matter is quark matter, in fact the vast majority of matter is probably leptonic.

I think Teddy is referring to the theoretical phase of matter referred to as quark or QCD matter.

Quark matter is matter hot enough that the proporties are governed by the behavior of individual quarks, rather than by the behavior of groupings of quarks like protons etc. On it's own, this requires a temperature of around 10^{12}K, but in instances like neutron stars, gravitational energy manages to create quark matter at lower temperatures. Quark matter physics is defined by the strong force.

Of course, it's only very theoretical at the moment, but there is good evidence that such a phase of matter has been produced in some particle colliders.

A little more information here: QCD matter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QCD_matter)

Hello Capuchin

All we (think to) know of quark matter is that it should have existed very short during the Big Bang process.
After that extremely short moment all quarks became the permanent and bound building stones of all baryon matter.

I referred directly to Teddy's literal question :

What would happen if the earth was struck by a substantial amount of quark matter.

I fully agree with your post #2 that we would die.
But we would die long before it would hit earth, because knowing the temperature required for quark matter to exist freely, we would have been roasted much earlier.

QCD matter in reality does not exist (it is only theorized). Quarks do not exist as free parts on a stable basis. Temperatures required to allow great quantities of quarks to escape from proton/neutron confinement have so far never been encountered within our universe.
And therefore : what is meant with "a substantial amount of quark matter"??
That is the reason why I replied the question the way I did, with that question first.

Link to 'real' quark matters ... (http://www.physics.brocku.ca/~edik/dr.fun/subatomic-hookers.jpg):)