Compact Stars: Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics and General Relativity (Astronomy and Astrophysics Library) [Hardcover]

Norman K. Glendenning (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0387989773 | ISBN-13: 978-0387989778 | Publication Date: June 16, 2000 | Edition: 2nd

White dwarfs, neutron stars, and (solar mass) black holes are the collapsed cores of stars which, near the ends of their luminous lives, have shed most of their mass in supernova explosions or other, less spectacular, instabilities. Here gravity crushes matter to realms that lie far beyond present empirical knowledge. This book explores the diverse forms that such compact stars can possibly take, as constrained by the laws of nature: the general principles of relativity and quantum mechanics, the properties of nuclear matter deduced from nuclei, and the asymptotic freedom of quarks at high density. The book is self contained. It reviews general relativity, essential aspects of nuclear and particle physics, and general features of white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes; it includes background on such matters as stellar formation and evolution, the discovery of pulsars and associated phenomena, and the strange-matter hypothesis. The book develops a theory for the constitution of neutron stars and the more exotic Hyperon Stars, Hybrid Stars (containing a quark matter core surrounded by an intricate lattice of quark and hadronic matter) and Strange Stars and Dwarfs (composed of the three light quark flavors sheathed in a solid skin of heavy ions). This second edition has been revised throughout to clarify discussions and bring data up to date; it includes new figures, several new sections, and new chapters on Bose condensates in neutron stars and on phase transitions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

REVIEW OF THE FIRST EDITION
"Deals thoroughly with the equations of state, the structure and constitution of white dwarfs, and neutron stars ... It contains material that can be hard to find elsewhere."
THE OBSERVATORY

Product Details

• Hardcover: 485 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 2nd edition (June 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387989773
• ISBN-13: 978-0387989778
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,536,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting but advanced textbook, November 22, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Compact Stars: Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics and General Relativity (Astronomy and Astrophysics Library) (Hardcover)

Compact stars are fascinating objects. It is sad that it is difficult to adequately explain many of their properties in a book for the layman. This book does a great job, but it is basically a textbook for graduate students.

This book does review the fundamentals of compact stars. It shows the evidence that the source of energy for a supernova is the binding energy of a neutron star (that binding energy is about ten per cent of the mass).

Compact stars are relativistic, the book teaches us General Relativity, in what I consider a very readable and instructive chapter. The Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations are then derived to obtain the gravitational mass and pressure gradient for a static and spherically symmetric compact star. We're also reminded of a famous test of General Relativity provided by the Hulse-Taylor pulsar binary discovered in 1974. That test found a decay in the orbital period of 0.76 microseconds per year, agreeing to within a percent of the calculations of energy loss through gravitational radiation predicted by General Relativity: convincing evidence if you ask me!

And we're reminded that some of these compact stars rotate at very high rates. And that objects falling towards them starting at rest from a great distance fall not towards the center of the star but instead acquire ever larger angular velocities as they approach.

After that we learn some theoretical basics about white dwarves and neutron stars, their temperatures, the stellar sequences that produce them, and black holes.

Next we find we need to learn some Lagrangian Field Theory, so that we can try to derive a relativistically covariant theory of dense hadronic matter (the likely constituent of neutron stars). We learn about sigma-omega models and the isospin force. And the author also gets to the question of whether neutron matter is bound or unbound. While neutron stars are clearly bound by gravity, not the nuclear force, the issue is whether there is a bound state of neutron matter at any density. If so, then the surfaces of neutron stars are, well, neutrons, rather than some overlying layer of matter at subnuclear density.

There's a section on the observational evidence for neutron stars, namely pulsar observations. And then we get into the constitution (including the hyperon density) and phase transitions in neutron stars, followed by an extensive discussion of rotating neutron stars.

There's a discussion of pulsar "glitches" which are hypothesized to be starquakes, caused by deceleration-induced stress on the crust of the star. I wish Glendenning had said more about an additional possibility, namely that the star is a rotating neutron superfluid, penetrated by an array of vortex lines, and that the glitches are transitions between metastable states of the vortex array. There are also analogies with experiments done on superfluid liquid helium that support this, so I was hoping to see a discussion of it. Either way, the glitches seem to imply the existence of a crust, ruling out theories of a bound state of neutron matter.

Finally, we've gotten to the fun stuff: quark stars. After all, quarks are the constituents of nucleons, and they're asymptotically free. So are there hybrid stars, with quark matter in the central region and a nuclear matter mantle? That gets us into our introduction to the concept of strange and charm stars, and the MIT bag model of quark confinement. And at the end of the book, we see discussions of the structure of strange quark stars. This is an exciting field, as observations of sub-millisecond pulsars would imply the existence of these strange quark stars. That in turn would imply that the actual ground state of the stong interaction is not quarks confined in hadrons but deconfined strange quark matter. In short. "it would tell us that the universe is in a very long-lived but excited state."

This is a very interesting book, and it is a shame that it requires so much background material to appreciate it.