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The very early universe was dense and opaque. During the quark epoch, the entirety of the universe, up to every boundary, was a filled-in ball of QGP. Much like a star is a ball of ionized nuclei that are too hot and pressurized for electrons to interact with, and a neutron star is a ball of hadrons that are too hot and pressurized to form into nuclei...

Wouldn't the universe at the time of the quark epoch be the next step? A ball of quarks, and leptons, and bosons that are so hot and so pressurized that they cannot form into hadrons?

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I understand the analogy you're making, and it's definitely interesting. I think that it is, at best, just an analogy though. A critical part of the definition of a star is that it is in hydrostatic equilibrium--the inward pull of gravity balances the outward pressure of the hot plasma. The universe is believed to have been expanding monotonically from the instant of the Big Bang and thus the primordial QGP was never in any sort of equilibrium state like a star.

Your question is related to an area of current research about free quarks, though. The question of whether or not unbound quark matter (i.e. QGP) lies at the heart of neutron stars is an ongoing topic of discussion and research. This paper might be an interesting place to start reading about new results.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you for indulging my thought-process, and for the paper. You've been very helpful to my odd way of digesting all this information. $\endgroup$
    – blacktopshaman
    Commented Apr 18, 2023 at 16:40

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