Relativistic models of the neutron-star matter equation of state

Understand

Motivated by a recent astrophysical measurement of the pressure of cold matter above nuclear-matter saturation density, we compute the equation of state of neutron star matter using accurately calibrated relativistic models.

• The uniform stellar core is assumed to consist of nucleons and leptons in beta equilibrium; no exotic degrees of freedom are included.
• We found the predictions of these models to be in fairly good agreement with the measured equation of state.
• Yet the Mass-vs-Radius relations predicted by these same models display radii that are consistently larger than the observations.