TY - JOUR
T1 - Extreme matter meets extreme gravity
T2 - Ultraheavy neutron stars with phase transitions
AU - Tan, Hung
AU - Dore, Travis
AU - Dexheimer, Veronica
AU - Noronha-Hostler, Jacquelyn
AU - Yunes, Nicolás
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Hank Lamm, Mauricio Hippert, Deep Chatterjee, Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño, and Abhishek Hegde for useful discussions related to this work J. N. H. and T. D. acknowledge the support from the US-DOE Nuclear Science Grant No. DE-SC0020633. H. T. and N. Y. acknowledge support from NASA Grants No. NNX16AB98G, No. 80NSSC17M0041, and No. 80NSSC18K1352 and NSF Grant No. 1759615. V. D. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1748621 and PHAROS (COST Action No. CA16214). The authors also acknowledge support from the Illinois Campus Cluster, a computing resource that is operated by the Illinois Campus Cluster Program (ICCP) in conjunction with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and which is supported by funds from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 American Physical Society.
PY - 2022/1/15
Y1 - 2022/1/15
N2 - The speed of sound of the matter within neutron stars may contain nonsmooth structure related to first- or higher-order phase transitions. Here we investigate what are the observable consequences of structure in the speed of sound, such as bumps, spikes, step functions, plateaus, and kinks. One of the main consequences is the possibility of ultraheavy neutron stars (with masses larger than 2.5 solar masses), mass twins in heavy (with masses larger than 2 solar masses) and ultraheavy neutron stars. These stars pass all observational and theoretical constraints, including those imposed by recent LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave observations and NICER x-ray observations. We thoroughly investigate other consequences of this structure in the speed of sound to develop an understanding of how nonsmooth features affect astrophysical observables, such as stellar radii, tidal deformability, moment of inertia, and Love number. Our results have important implications for future gravitational wave and x-ray observations of neutron stars and their impact in nuclear astrophysics.
AB - The speed of sound of the matter within neutron stars may contain nonsmooth structure related to first- or higher-order phase transitions. Here we investigate what are the observable consequences of structure in the speed of sound, such as bumps, spikes, step functions, plateaus, and kinks. One of the main consequences is the possibility of ultraheavy neutron stars (with masses larger than 2.5 solar masses), mass twins in heavy (with masses larger than 2 solar masses) and ultraheavy neutron stars. These stars pass all observational and theoretical constraints, including those imposed by recent LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave observations and NICER x-ray observations. We thoroughly investigate other consequences of this structure in the speed of sound to develop an understanding of how nonsmooth features affect astrophysical observables, such as stellar radii, tidal deformability, moment of inertia, and Love number. Our results have important implications for future gravitational wave and x-ray observations of neutron stars and their impact in nuclear astrophysics.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.105.023018
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.105.023018
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123769029
SN - 2470-0010
VL - 105
JO - Physical Review D
JF - Physical Review D
IS - 2
M1 - 023018
ER -