The size of an object composed of strange matter could, theoretically, range from a few femtometers across (with the mass of a light nucleus) to arbitrarily large.
Only if many conversions occur almost simultaneously will the number of strange quarks reach the critical proportion required to achieve a lower energy state.
[14] In May 2002, a group of researchers at Southern Methodist University reported the possibility that strangelets may have been responsible for seismic events recorded on October 22 and November 24 in 1993.
[16] It has been suggested that the International Monitoring System be set up to verify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) after entry into force may be useful as a sort of "strangelet observatory" using the entire Earth as its detector.
The IMS will be designed to detect anomalous seismic disturbances down to 1 kiloton of TNT (4.2 TJ) energy release or less, and could be able to track strangelets passing through Earth in real time if properly exploited.
It has been suggested that strangelets of subplanetary (i.e. heavy meteorite) mass would puncture planets and other Solar System objects, leading to impact craters which show characteristic features.
[18][19] This is not a concern for strangelets in cosmic rays because they are produced far from Earth and have had time to decay to their ground state, which is predicted by most models to be positively charged, so they are electrostatically repelled by nuclei, and would rarely merge with them.
[20][21] On the other hand, high-energy collisions could produce negatively charged strangelet states, which could live long enough to interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter.
A detailed analysis[19] concluded that the RHIC collisions were comparable to ones which naturally occur as cosmic rays traverse the Solar System, so we would already have seen such a disaster if it were possible.
A neutron star is in a sense a giant nucleus (20 km across), held together by gravity, but it is electrically neutral and would not electrostatically repel strangelets.
This comes from the phenomenology of X-ray bursts, which is well explained in terms of a nuclear matter crust,[35] and from measurement of seismic vibrations in magnetars.