“Can Self-Replicating Species Flourish in the Interior of a Star?”, 2020-08-29 (; similar):
The existing view of biological life is that it evolves under suitable conditions in the low-temperature world of atoms and molecules on the surface of a planet. It is believed that any plausible extraterrestrial form of life must resemble the life on Earth that is ruled by biochemistry of nucleic acids, proteins, and sugars.
Going against this dogma, we argue that an advanced form of life based upon short-lived nuclear species can exist inside main-sequence stars like our Sun.
[Keywords: nuclear life, cosmic necklaces]
…In a second stage, the symmetry breaks further into K = ℤ2 where strings would form. Remarkably, there is a stable configuration, the bead, in which the magnetic flux of the magnetic monopole 4π/e is confined to 2 stable ℤ2 strings, each carrying a flux of 2π/e [6, 7]. Such string structures with monopole beads are so-called “necklaces.”
Remarkably, multiple strings can originate from monopoles and connect them into 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional structures, resembling atoms coupled by chemical bonds [8]. Since information needs to be written on a one dimensional chain to ensure easy reading and transcription [9], monopoles and antimonopoles of one kind would not be sufficient for that purpose. Each string carrying half of the magnetic flux that originates on a monopole has to go into antimonopole, thus making monopoles and antimonopoles of one kind alternate in a one-dimensional chain. Such a chain would not carry any information. However, with various kinds of monopoles and non-Abelian cosmic strings discussed in the literature, it is easy to envision more complex sequences capable of encoding information. For example, 2 adjacent semipoles [10], unlike monopoles, need not have total charge zero and can repel each other instead of moving toward each other and annihilating [11, 12].
…The lifetime of such objects can be very short as far as their individual dynamics in a vacuum is concerned. It can be longer in a plasma of a star (see below) and can also be controlled by the metabolic process they encode. Note in this connection that any biological organism, when considered individually, is unstable. Compared to the lifetime of a star, its lifetime is an instantaneous spark of light in the dark. What is important is that such a spark manages to produce more sparks before it fades away, thus providing a long lifespan of the species. The complexity evolving through mutations and natural selection increases with the number of generations passed. Consequently, if lifetimes of self-replicating nuclear species are as short as lifetimes of many unstable composite nuclear objects are, they can quickly evolve toward enormous complexity.
…Cosmic strings are classical solutions of relativistic field-theory models that are analogous to flux lines in superconductors. Such analogy arises from the mathematical equivalence of, eg. Abelian Higgs model and Landau-Ginzburg theory of superconductivity. We will use this analogy to speculate on how the strings captured by the star could create a network of necklaces. There are processes in condensed matter in which a string loop breaks into a string with open ends capped by monopole and antimonopole (which corresponds to the formation of the monopole-antimonopole pair on a string); see, eg. [17, 18, 19, 20]. This analogy could also be translated to hadron physics, where the quarks would act as the carriers of magnetic charge permanently bound in pairs by the string bonds [21]. If besides stretching, interconnecting, and forming new loops, the turbulent plasma also breaks them into segments capped by monopoles, the turbulence would produce monopoles together with networks of strings; see Figure 2.
Small segments of strings capped by monopoles formed in this way can be the building blocks of longer information carriers once they split into semipoles to form cosmic necklaces. Information stored in a cosmic necklace must encode nuclear species that, by analogy with the DNA-protein machinery, must assist replication of necklaces. The details of such process may be as complicated as the details of the primordial self-replication that led to the origin of the biological cell, which are unknown. Life on Earth is the only proof that such mechanism exists. For that reason, we will not go beyond the ability of nuclear species to store information.