Natural Science Forum / Physics / Particle Physics / November 2006

I've been thinking about QCD a bit lately, which led me to thinking
about quark matter.
My question concerns strange matter, containing up, down, and strange
quarks.

I'm still fairly new to the particle physics game, but it seems to me
that because the strange quark is quite
a bit more massive than the up quark, quark mixing by the weak force
should mean it decays fairly quickly via strange -> up + electron +
electron anti-neutrino.

Is the abundance of strange quarks in strange matter then determined by
a thermodynamic equilibrium?
I imagine it would generally be pretty small?