A New Constraint on the Nuclear Equation of State from Statistical Distributions of Compact Remnants of Supernovae

Abstract

Understanding how matter behaves at the highest densities and temperatures is a major open problem in both nuclear physics and relativistic astrophysics. This physics is often encapsulated in the so-called high-temperature nuclear equation of state, which influences compact binary mergers, core-collapse supernovae, and many more phenomena. One such case is the type (either black hole or neutron star) and mass of the remnant of the core collapse of a massive star. For each of six candidate equations of state, we use a very large suite of spherically symmetric supernova models to generate a suite of synthetic populations of such remnants. We then compare these synthetic populations to the observed remnant population. We thus provide a novel constraint on the high-temperature nuclear equation of state and describe which EOS candidates are more or less favored by this metric.

Comments: Accepted by ApJ Letters; revised version; 3 figures, 2 tables