Impact of error analysis on the composition the outer crust of a neutron star

TL;DR

This paper uses bootstrap error analysis on a nuclear mass model to study how uncertainties affect predictions of the outer crust composition of neutron stars, revealing mixed species due to statistical uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a bootstrap-based error analysis to assess uncertainties in neutron star crust composition predictions.

Findings

Uncertainty causes mixed nuclear species in crust layers.

Existence probability varies with crust depth.

Transition between layers is not sharply defined.

Abstract

By means of bootstrap technique, we perform a full error analysis on the Duflo-Zucker mass model. We illustrate the impact of such study on the predicted chemical composition of the outer crust of a non-accreting neutron star. We define an existence probability for each nuclear species as a function of the depth of the crust. We observe that, due to statistical uncertainties, instead of having a well defined transition between two successive layers, we have a mixture of two species.