Gravitational Waves Will Give Astronomers a new way to Look Inside Neutron Stars - by BrianKoberlein
It’s difficult to study neutron stars. They are light years away and only about 20 kilometers across. They are also made of the most dense material in the universe. So dense that atomic nuclei merge together to become a complex fluid. For years our understanding of the interiors was based on complex physical models and what little data we could gather from optical telescopes. But that’s starting to change.for nuclear matter, known as the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation.
Observationally we know the upper mass limit for a neutron star is about two solar masses, but we don’t know an absolute limit as we do for white dwarfs. We also don’t know if quarks can be liberated within the interior to make a strange kind ofOne of the challenges to answering these questions is the limitation of optical data we have. We can’t see inside a neutron star, so we are limited to indirect observations.