I just found out about a possible type of neutron star called an electroweak star in which a tiny core is so dense, it unifies the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces into the electroweak force and generates energy by converting quarks into neutrinos. Where can I find more information on this phenomemon?
You could do worse than to read the references, sources, and further reading on the Wikipedea page. That is what anyone else would do.
In particular the original article on arXiv contains probably more information than you want. You can skim the mathematics, and read the main body of prose and get a pretty good idea.
I’ve read about electroweak stars before, but never thought about them very deeply. The articles give a lifetime of around 10 million years. I assume that is the amount of time it takes to “evaporate” off enough neutrinos to no longer be massive enough to be electroweak?
No, the time scale for evaporation of such a dense, massive object would be very many orders of magnitude larger. The 10 million year limit is that there is a limited amount of ‘fuel’ for the processes that maintain the pressure in the electroweak star and prevent further collapse. Of course electroweak stars are speculative.
Aren’t we saying the same thing?
Sorry I misread your post - I thought you meant evaporation full-stop.
The process actually relies on sufficient number of neutrinos escaping the core of the star to keep it going.
That’s the lot. That single paper is the entirety of the literature on the topic. The paper appears to have pressed all the right buttons to have caught the eye of a few pop-sci writers at the time, but they were all working off that one source. Wikipedia cites six different references and sources, but they amount to the original paper plus five pop-sci re-tellings. The original paper has no substantive citations, and none of the four authors ever went back to the idea. Nor did anyone else.
Skimming the paper, it’s a relatively back-of-the-envelope treatment, and it appears to have been a neat idea poked at a bit by a small group. However, the paper has many… um… bold assumptions and simplifications in it, certainly too many critical ones to say that the hypothesized star actually could exist.