2022 journal article
A New Constraint on the Nuclear Equation of State from Statistical Distributions of Compact Remnants of Supernovae
The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
open access via doi.org (publisher)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
(Web of Science)
Source: ORCID
Added: June 15, 2022
Abstract Understanding how matter behaves at the highest densities and temperatures is a major open problem in both nuclear physics and relativistic astrophysics. Our understanding of such behavior is often encapsulated in the so-called high-temperature nuclear equation of state (EOS), which influences compact binary mergers, core-collapse supernovae, and other phenomena. Our focus is on the type (either black hole or neutron star) and mass of the remnant of the core collapse of a massive star. For each six candidates of equations of state, we use a very large suite of spherically symmetric supernova models to generate a sample of synthetic populations of such remnants. We then compare these synthetic populations to the observed remnant population. Our study provides a novel constraint on the high-temperature nuclear EOS and describes which EOS candidates are more or less favored by an information-theoretic metric.