THE NEUTRON STAR MASS–RADIUS RELATION AND THE EQUATION OF STATE OF DENSE MATTER

By A. Steiner, J. Lattimer, E. Brown. 2012

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The equation of state (EOS) of dense matter has been a long-sought goal of nuclear physics. EOSs generate unique mass versus radius (M–R) relations for neutron stars, the ultra-dense remnants of stellar evolution. In this work, we determine the neutron star mass–radius relation and, based on recent observations of both transiently accreting and bursting sources, we show that the radius of a 1.4 solar mass neutron star lies between 10.4 and 12.9 km, independent of assumptions about the composition of the core. We show, for the first time, that these constraints remain valid upon removal from our sample of the most extreme transient sources or of the entire set of bursting sources; our constraints also apply even if deconfined quark matter exists in the neutron star core. Our results significantly constrain the dense matter EOS and are furthermore consistent with constraints from both heavy-ion collisions and theoretical studies of neutron matter. We predict a relatively weak dependence of the symmetry energy on the density and a value for the neutron skin thickness of lead which is less than 0.20 fm, results that are testable in forthcoming experiments.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33d18e35728d7d214f980b8fb29505d8ac1a2429

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Citations in the corpus

A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Implications for the Dense Matter Equation of State (2019, background): “Steiner et al. (2010, 2013, 2018) and Lattimer & Steiner (2014) considered a larger range of parameterized EoS models to infer dense matter parameters including those associated with the nuclear symmetry energy and the mass–radius bands.”
EQUATION OF STATE AND NEUTRON STAR PROPERTIES CONSTRAINED BY NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND OBSERVATION (2013, background): “Further information may be obtained, for example, from modeling X-ray bursts and quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries (Özel et al. 2010, 2012; Steiner et al. 2010, 2013; Güver & Özel 2013), but the neutron star properties deduced are more model-dependent than the direct mass constraint from a very…”
THE DENSE MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FROM NEUTRON STAR RADIUS AND MASS MEASUREMENTS (2015, result): “This is similar in magnitude to the result obtained by Steiner et al. (2013), even when they considered extreme scenarios (see their Fig.”
Symmetry energy impact in simulations of core-collapse supernovae (2013, background): “e compatible with the current maximum neutron-star mass constraint of 2:01 0:04 M. The determination of NS radii is still a very challenging task. Several groups obtain substantially dierent results[23,59,60,61,62] due to distinct model assumptions, e.g. composition and properties of the atmosphere.”
Evidence for a maximum mass cut-off in the neutron star mass distribution and constraints on the equation of state (2017, methodology): “Measurements of NS masses and radii together can put strong constraints on the EoS (Read et al. 2009; Özel & Psaltis 2009; Özel et al. 2010; Steiner et al. 2010; Guillot et al. 2013; Steiner et al. 2013a,b; Özel et al. 2016).”
A new quark-hadron hybrid equation of state for astrophysics - I. High-mass twin compact stars (2014, background): “We note that in addition to the size of the emitting region, the main issue of the radius analyses using X-ray burst sources such as Steiner et al. (2010) and Steiner et al. (2013), is the question of the atmosphere composition.”
CONSTRAINING THE SYMMETRY PARAMETERS OF THE NUCLEAR INTERACTION (2012, methodology): “A more recent study (Steiner et al. 2013) considered additional sources, and in addition considered systematic variations to the fiducial analysis in which one or more sources were excluded from the Bayesian analysis.”