Using Neutron Star Observations to Determine Crust Thicknesses, Moments of Inertia, and Tidal Deformabilities

Understand

We perform a systematic assessment of models for the equation of state (EOS) of dense matter in the context of recent neutron star mass and radius measurements to obtain a broad picture of the structure of neutron stars.

• We demonstrate that currently available neutron star mass and radius measurements provide strong constraints on moments of inertia, tidal deformabilities, and crust thicknesses.
• A measurement of the moment of inertia of PSR J0737-3039A with 10% error, without any other information from observations, will constrain the EOS over a range of densities to within 50%$-$60%.
• We find tidal deformabilities between 0.6 and $6\times 10^{36}$ g cm$^{2}$ s$^{2}$ (to 95% confidence) for $M=1.4~\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$, and any measurement which constrains this range will provide an important constraint on dense matter.