Structure of Quark Stars

This paper gives an brief overview of the structure of hypothetical strange quarks stars (quark stars, for short), which are made of absolutely stable 3-flavor strange quark matter. Such objects can be either bare or enveloped in thin nuclear crusts, which consist of heavy ions immersed in an electron gas. In contrast to neutron stars, the structure of quark stars is determined by two (rather than one) parameters, the central star density and the density at the base of the crust. If bare, quark stars possess ultra-high electric fields on the order of 1018 to 1019 V/cm. These features render the properties of quark stars more multifaceted than those of neutron stars and may allow one to observationally distinguish quark stars from neutron stars.