Mass and radius formulas for low-mass neutron stars

Abstract

Neutron stars, produced at the death of massive stars, are often regarded as giant neutron-rich nuclei. This picture is especially relevant for low-mass (below about solar mass) neutron stars, where non-nucleonic components are not expected to occur. Due to the saturation property of nucleonic matter, leading to the celebrated liquid-drop picture of atomic nuclei, empirical nuclear masses and radii can be approximately expressed as function of atomic mass number. It is, however, not straightforward to express masses and radii of neutron stars even in the low-mass range where the structure is determined by a balance between the pressure of neutron-rich nucleonic matter and the gravity. Such expressions would be of great use given possible simultaneous mass and radius measurements. Here we successfully construct theoretical formulas for the masses and radii of low-mass neutron stars from various models that are consistent with empirical masses and radii of stable nuclei. In this process, we discover a new equation-of-state parameter that characterizes the structure of low-mass neutron stars. This parameter, which plays a key role in connecting the mass-radius relation of the laboratory nuclei to that of the celestial objects, could be constrained from future observations of low-mass neutron stars.