In a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder (link), she said that cosmic strings are strings (from string theory) that have grown to galactic sizes from the time of the early universe. This surprised be a bit because I previously heard that the two things are completely unrelated.
In Wikipedia I found the following
the expanding Universe could have stretched a "fundamental" string (the sort which superstring theory considers) until it was of intergalactic size. Such a stretched string would exhibit many of the properties of the old "cosmic" string variety.
So are there actually several "varieties" of cosmic strings, some related to string theory and some that are not (the "old" ones here I guess?). Could those varieties be distinguished from each other? (The article says that they would exhibit many similar properties, but not if they would be completely indistinguishable). Sabine mentioned in her video that observing cosmic strings would lend support to string theory. Does that means she assumes we will not be able to distinguish it from the "old" variety ?
