Impact of the PSR J0740+6620 radius constraint on the properties of high-density matter

Abstract

X-ray pulse profile modeling of PSR J0740+6620, the most massive known pulsar, with data from the NICER and XMM-Newton observatories recently led to a measurement of its radius. We investigate this measurement's implications for the neutron star equation of state (EoS), employing a nonparametric EoS model based on Gaussian processes and combining information from other x-ray, radio and gravitational-wave observations of neutron stars. Our analysis mildly disfavors EoSs that support a disconnected hybrid star branch in the mass-radius relation, a proxy for strong phase transitions, with a Bayes factor of 6.9. For such EoSs, the transition mass from the hadronic to the hybrid branch is constrained to lie outside (1,2) M_⊙. We also find that the conformal sound-speed bound is violated inside neutron star cores, which implies that the core matter is strongly interacting. The squared sound speed reaches a maximum of 0.75^(+0.25)_(−0.24) c² at 3.60^(+2.25)_(−1.89) times nuclear saturation density at 90% credibility. Since all but the gravitational-wave observations prefer a relatively stiff EoS, PSR J0740+6620's central density is only 3.57^(+1.3)_(−1.3) times nuclear saturation, limiting the density range probed by observations of cold, nonrotating neutron stars in β-equilibrium.

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