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Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit

(TOV, LOV, Landau-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit)
(maximum mass of a neutron star)

The Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit (TOV or Landau-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit or LOV) is the maximum mass of a neutron star, i.e., the mass at which gravitational pull is balanced with the outward degeneracy pressure. It is the analog of the Chandrasekhar limit that limits the size of white dwarfs. It is not merely a solution to a single equation, but has been developed and improved over time as more about neutron stars has been modeled and discovered. Current values are in the neighborhood of 2.1 solar masses. Like the Chandrasekhar limit, it assumes absence of rotation (and possibly no magnetic field); rotation could plausibly allow a higher mass neutron star.

Such a limit was seriously theorized by Lev Landau in 1932, and worked on worked on by Richard Chace Tolman. J. Robert Oppenheimer and George Volkoff did further work in 1939, creating the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation (TOV equation) which is an equation for hydrostatic equilibrium that takes general relativity into account. Their value for the TOV limit was 0.7 solar masses, but they were using a relatively simple equation of state and modeling the neutron star as uniform. Since then, with more detailed neutron star models, the TOV limit has been thought to be within the 1.5 to 3.0 solar mass range, which would be the stellar remnant of a main sequence star in the 15 to 20 solar mass range. The recent advent of GW detections involving neutron stars has provided an additional source of information.


(astrophysics,stars,neutron stars,constant,limit,mass,degeneracy)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff_limit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff_equation
https://briankoberlein.com/blog/over-the-limit/
http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~friesen/specialist.pdf
https://www.ictp-saifr.org/schoolgr/Lecture2Creighton.pdf
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018PhRvD..97b1501R/abstract

Referenced by pages:
Chandrasekhar limit
hypermassive neutron star (HMNS)

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