Interestingly, this little article is from something dubbed "the Physics arXiv Blog" - could be a fun thing to add to the RSS feed.

Essentially, the author of the paper is looking mostly to explain powerful gamma ray bursts via a mechanism in supernovae. It relies on a prediction of QCD where even neutron degeneracy could be overcome, and this phase change would, through a few steps, result in a tremendous amount of released energy.

Incidentally, it would prevent the core from becoming a black hole.

From the preprint:

The preprint said:

If the mass of a star is sufficiently large, then this implosion produces an enormous heating, which stops only after quark-gluon plasma of a temperature about 100 MeV (or even higher) is formed to withstand the gravitational compression (whereas the highest temperatures of supernovae bursts are, at least, one order lower). As a consequence, a ”burning wall” must be, most probably, erected on the way of further collapsing the matter towards a black hole formation.

I wonder if the light leaving from such object would have substantial gravitational redshift... ;)