Peak Warming Man said:
And how will this limit be enforced.
> Combined with the GW data, they concluded that the maximum mass of non-rotating neutron stars cannot exceed 2.16 solar masses.
The maximum mas of non-rotating neutron stars is one of the great unknowns of astrophysics. Literally hundreds of astrophysicists have weighed in on the question, starting with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who gave a limit of 1.44 solar masses for the maximum mass of white dwarfs, the Chandrasekhar limit.
Working on that, the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit gave 1.5 to 3.0 solar masses for the maximum mass of neutron stars, depending on the internal structure of the neutron star.In the case of neutron stars this limit was first worked out by J. Robert Oppenheimer and George Volkoff in 1939, using the work of Richard Chace Tolman.
It may or may not come as a surprise to you that no-one really has much of a clue as to what the matter inside a neutron star is really like. The presence or absence of a GUT makes quite a difference to the outcome.
Observationally, “The mass of the pulsar PSR J0348+0432, at 2.01±0.04 solar masses, puts an empirical lower bound on the TOV limit.” which is less than the new gravitational wave based limit of 2.16 solar masses.
Here we go, this image is the one I’m looking for. Each line is a different “equation of state” for a neutron star interior. Each line has a different maximum mass.
