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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.
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 ...
In the nonrelativistic case, electron degeneracy pressure gives rise to an equation of state of the form P = K 1 ρ 5/3, where P is the pressure, ρ is the mass density, and K 1 is a constant. Solving the hydrostatic equation leads to a model white dwarf that is a polytrope of index 3 / 2 – and therefore has radius inversely ...
This is the pressure that prevents a white dwarf star from collapsing. A star exceeding this limit and without significant thermally generated pressure will continue to collapse to form either a neutron star or black hole, because the degeneracy pressure provided by the electrons is weaker than the inward pull of gravity.
In a star less massive than the limit, the gravitational compression is balanced by short-range repulsive neutron–neutron interactions mediated by the strong force and also by the quantum degeneracy pressure of neutrons, preventing collapse. [12]: 74 If its mass is above the limit, the star will collapse to some denser form.
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 ...
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In thermodynamics, the reduced properties of a fluid are a set of state variables scaled by the fluid's state properties at its critical point.These dimensionless thermodynamic coordinates, taken together with a substance's compressibility factor, provide the basis for the simplest form of the theorem of corresponding states.