Post-Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff formalism for relativistic stars

Understand

Besides their astrophysical interest, compact stars also provide an arena for understanding the properties of theories of gravity that differ from Einstein's general relativity.

• Numerous studies have shown that different modified theories of gravity can modify the bulk properties (such as mass and radius) of neutron stars for given assumptions on the microphysics.
• What is not usually stressed though is the strong degeneracy in the predictions of these theories for the stellar mass and radius.
• Motivated by this observation, in this paper we take an alternative route and construct a stellar structure formalism which, without adhering to any particular theory of gravity, describes in a simple parametrized form the departure from compact stars in general relativity.