Document Type

Article

Department

​​Physics

Publication Date

2004

Abstract

In contrast to the widely held belief that a degenerate star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel will, if sufficiently massive, unremittingly collapse to a singularity in space (unless the contraction is prevented by some unknown process of quantum gravity acting at the scale of the Planck length), I present a heuristic argument, based on known quantum processes, for the existence of stable equilibrium states of neutron stars and quark stars with macroscopic radii and masses unconstrained by the Chandrasekhar and Oppenheimer–Volkoff limits. The processes that stabilize the star against gravitational contraction involve strong magnetic coupling of the constituent fermions and fermionic pair production at the expense of gravitational potential energy.

Publication Title

International Journal of Modern Physics

Volume

13

Issue

10

DOI

10.1142/S0218271804006334

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