Thermal evolution of neutron stars with global and local neutrality

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermal evolution of globally neutral neutron stars, revealing how their unique structure affects cooling behavior and offering potential observational tests for their core-crust transition properties.

Contribution

It introduces a model for globally neutral neutron stars based on Einstein-Maxwell-Thomas-Fermi equations and analyzes their thermal evolution, contrasting with traditional local neutrality models.

Findings

Relaxation time depends on crust density, with a threshold at ~5×10^{13} g/cm^3.

Thin or absent inner crusts lead to longer crust cooling times due to neutrino emission blocking.

Thermal relaxation observations can probe the core-crust transition and internal structure.

Abstract

Globally neutral neutron stars, obtained from the solution of the called Einstein-Maxwell-Thomas-Fermi equations that account for all the fundamental interactions, have been recently introduced. These configurations have a more general character than the ones obtained with the traditional Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff, which impose the condition of local charge neutrality. The resulting configurations have a less massive and thinner crust, leading to a new mass-radius relation. Signatures of this new structure of the neutron star on the thermal evolution might be a potential test for this theory. We compute the cooling curves by integrating numerically the energy balance and transport equations in general relativity, for globally neutral neutron stars with crusts of different masses and sizes, according to this theory for different core-crust transition interfaces. We compare and contrast our study with known results for local charge neutrality. We found a new behavior for the relaxation time, depending upon the density at the base of the crust, $\rho_{\rm crust}$. In particular, we find that the traditional increase of the relaxation time with the crust thickness holds only for configurations whose density of the base of the crust is greater than $\approx 5\times 10^{13}$ g cm$^{-3}$. The reason for this is that neutron star crusts with very thin or absent inner crust have some neutrino emission process blocked which keep the crust hotter for longer times. Therefore, accurate observations of the thermal relaxation phase of neutron stars might give crucial information on the core-crust transition which may aid us in probing the inner composition/structure of these objects.