Structure and cooling of compact stars

Abstract

We study the structure and evolution of neutron stars (NS) the interiors of which are modeled using microscopic approaches and constrained by the condition that the equation of state (EoS) of matter extrapolated to high densities should not contradict known observational data from compact stars and experimental data from heavy-ion collisions (HIC). We use modern cooling simulations to extract distributions of NS masses required to reproduce those of the yet sparse data in the Temperature-Age (TA) plane. By comparing the results with a mass distribution for young, nearby NSs used in population synthesis we can sharpen the NS cooling constraints.