A star's radius drops by a thousand kilometers. Not because its mass increased, but because its own magnetic field squeezed the crust like an invisible corset. At the center of such an object — a strange dwarf — hides a quark core: a sphere of strange matter with the weight of the Sun but a diameter of only three to four kilometers. This is the heavy seed. And around it, for thousands of kilometers, stretches a crystalline crust of carbon, oxygen, neon — ordinary matter laced with magnetic field lines.
In the crust, due to the magnetic field, pressure is no longer uniform in all directions. Electrons in the field can occupy only discrete Landau levels, and their contributions to radial and tangential pressures differ. The anisotropic force, equal to 2($P_t$ – $P_r$)/r, is always directed inward — it acts as additional compression. The crust contracts, and the overall radius of the star decreases. Calculations from the model with fields up to 4.4×10¹⁴ G showed: for a carbon crust at a mass of 1 M☉, the radius shrinks from 5118 km to 3783 km. If the crust evolution up to neutron drip is included, the star becomes even more compact — from 4851 km to 3653 km.
Heavier elements — oxygen, neon, magnesium — give the same picture. The advanced state of the crust itself (when free neutrons begin to appear) softens the equation of state, raising the pressure at the core boundary and making the seed more massive. Anisotropy adds a universal compression mechanism, not by renormalizing gravity, but by changing the force balance inside the star.
The MWDD catalog already contains several white dwarfs with suspiciously small radii for their mass. They fall right into the region where magnetic anisotropy shifts the theoretical branches. This means we can search for strange dwarfs by unusual compactness combined with signs of magnetic fields in the atmosphere — without racking our brains over exotic signals from the core.
The magnetic cocoon is not just a wrapper. It squeezes the seed, making the star noticeably smaller. A tight corset of field lines redistributes pressure and writes a new chapter in the physics of compact objects — a chapter where the crust plays the lead role.
Strange quark matter gets its name from the flavor of the s-quark (strange). If a droplet of such matter fell to Earth, it would convert ordinary matter into strange matter, releasing energy — a scenario known as a 'strangelet.' Fortunately, there is no experimental evidence for this.