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While degeneracy pressure usually dominates at extremely high densities, it is the ratio between degenerate pressure and thermal pressure which determines degeneracy. Given a sufficiently drastic increase in temperature (such as during a red giant star's helium flash ), matter can become non-degenerate without reducing its density.
Rather, the intense gravitational attraction of the compact mass overcomes the electron degeneracy pressure and causes electron capture to occur within the star. The result is a compact ball of nearly pure neutron matter with sparse protons and electrons interspersed, filling a space several thousand times smaller than the progenitor star. [4]
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Using the Fermi gas as a model, it is possible to calculate the Chandrasekhar limit, i.e. the maximum mass any star may acquire (without significant thermally generated pressure) before collapsing into a black hole or a neutron star. The latter, is a star mainly composed of neutrons, where the collapse is also avoided by neutron degeneracy ...
They therefore provide neutron degeneracy pressure to support a neutron star against collapse. In addition, repulsive neutron-neutron interactions [ citation needed ] provide additional pressure. Like the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarfs, there is a limiting mass for neutron stars: the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit , where these ...
Neutron stars are expected to have a skin or "atmosphere" of normal matter on the order of a millimeter thick, underneath which they are composed almost entirely of closely packed neutrons called neutron matter [5] with a slight dusting of free electrons and protons mixed in. This degenerate neutron matter has a density of about 6.65 × 10 17 ...
Cross-section of neutron star. Here, the core has neutrons or neutron-degenerate matter and quark matter.. Neutronium is used in popular physics literature [1] [2] to refer to the material present in the cores of neutron stars (stars which are too massive to be supported by electron degeneracy pressure and which collapse into a denser phase of matter).
Nuclear density is the density of the nucleus of an atom.For heavy nuclei, it is close to the nuclear saturation density = nucleons/fm 3, which minimizes the energy density of an infinite nuclear matter. [1]