'Surrogate' framework to hunt for exotic matter within neutron stars

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that enables them to infer the quantum interactions of protons and neutrons inside neutron stars directly from astrophysical observations. By analyzing multimessenger data—such as gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars and X-ray emissions captured by NASA’s NICER telescope—this AI acts as a high-speed surrogate for complex quantum physics calculations that were previously computationally prohibitive. This breakthrough allows researchers to robustly connect macroscopic observations of neutron stars with the microscopic nuclear forces governing dense matter, providing new insights into the strong nuclear force under extreme conditions. The AI framework combines a quantum-physics-based model with a neural network to rapidly solve for dense-matter properties, significantly accelerating the analysis process. The approach has already yielded constraints consistent with terrestrial experiments, though with larger uncertainties, and promises even greater precision with future observations from next-generation detectors like Cosmic Explorer. This capability opens new avenues for exploring exotic states of matter—such as quark-gluon plasmas—and elusive three