Comment on "Three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the combustion of a neutron star into a quark star"

Abstract

If strange matter is absolutely stable, the ordinary nuclei decay to strangelets, while neutron stars convert into strange stars. Lifetimes of the ordinary nuclei are constrained experimentally to be above $\sim 10^{33}$ years, while lifetimes of the metastable neutron stars depend on the neutron star masses and can exceed the age of the Universe. As a consequence, the neutron stars and the strange stars can coexist in the Universe. We point out that numerical simulations of the conversion of neutron stars to strange stars, performed by M. Herzog and F. K. Roepke in Phys. Rev. D 84, 083002 (2011) [arXiv:1109.0539], are focused on a region in the parameter space of strange matter, in which low-mass neutron stars and strange stars are coexistent, whereas massive neutron stars are unstable and short lived on an astronomical timescale.