GW190814: Circumstantial evidence for up-down quark star

Within a confining quark matter model which considers phenomenologically the quark confinement and asymptotic freedom as well as the chiral symmetry restoration and quark deconfinement at high baryon density, we find that if the up-down quark matter ($ud\mathrm{QM}$) is more stable than nuclear matter and strange quark matter (SQM), the maximum mass of static quark stars with $ud\mathrm{QM}$ is $2.87M_{\odot }$ under agreement with both the constraints on star tidal deformability from gravitational wave signal GW170817 and the mass-radius of PSR $\mathrm{J}0030+0451$ and PSR $\mathrm{J}0740+6620$ measured by NICER. In contrast, the conventional strange quark star with the SQM that is more stable than nuclear matter while the nuclear matter is more stable than $ud\mathrm{QM}$, has a maximum static mass of only $1.87M_{\odot }$ and its radius significantly deviates from NICER’s constraint. Our results thus provide circumstantial evidence suggesting the recently reported GW190814’s secondary component with a mass of ${2.59}_{-0.09}^{+0.08}{M}_{\odot }$ could be an up-down quark star.