Pure hadronic compact stars ("neutron stars") above a critical mass Mcr aremetastable" for the conversion to quark stars (hybrid or strange stars). This conver-sion process liberates an enormous amount of energy (E. 1053 ergs), which couldpower some of the observed gamma ray bursts.1-3 In cold deleptonized hadronic stars,the conversion process is triggered by the quantum nucleation of a quark matter drop inthe stellar center. These drops can be made up of normal (i.e. unpaired) quark matter, orcolor superconducting quark matter, depending on the details of the equation of state ofquark and hadronic matter.' In this talk, we present the results of recent calculations5 ofthe effects of color superconductivity on the conversion of hadronic stars to quark stars.In particular, we study the dependence of the critical mass Mcr and conversion energyEconv on the quark-quark pairing gap A, the bag constant B, and the surface tension aof the quark-hadron interface.
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