Violation of Chandrasekhar Mass Limit: The Exciting Potential of Strongly Magnetized White Dwarfs

Understand

We consider a relativistic, degenerate, electron gas under the influence of a strong magnetic field, which describes magnetized white dwarfs.

• Landau quantization changes the density of states available to the electrons, thus modifying the underlying equation of state.
• In the presence of very strong magnetic fields a maximum of either one, two or three Landau level(s) is/are occupied.
• We obtain the mass-radius relations for such white dwarfs and their detailed investigation leads us to propose the existence of white dwarfs having a mass ~2.3M_Sun, which overwhelmingly exceeds the Chandrasekhar mass limit.