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Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars THE PHYSICS OF COMPACT OBJECTS Stuart L. Shapiro Saul A. Teukolsky Cornell University, Ithaca, New York W IL EY- VCH WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA This Page Intentionally Left Blank Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars The Physics of Compact Objects This Page Intentionally Left Blank Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars THE PHYSICS OF COMPACT OBJECTS Stuart L. Shapiro Saul A. Teukolsky Cornell University, Ithaca, New York W IL EY- VCH WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA All books published by Wiley-VCH are carefully produced. Nevertheless, authors, editors, and publisher do not warrant the information contained in these books, including this book, to be free of errors. Readers are advised to keep in mind that statements, data, illustrations, procedural details or other items may inadvertently be inaccurate. Library of Congress Card No.: Applied for British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogratie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. 0 1983 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 0 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim All rights reserved (including those of translation into other languages). No part of this book may be reproduced in any form ~ nor transmitted or translated into machine language without written permission from the publishers. Registered names, trademarks, etc. used in this book, even when not specifically marked as such, are not to be considered unprotected by law. Printed in the Federal Republic of Germany Printed on acid-free paper Printing Strauss GmbH, Morlenbach Bookbinding Litges & Dopf Buchbinderei GmbH, Heppenheim ISBN-13: 978-0-47 1-873 16-7 ISBN-10: 0-471-87316-0 To Our Families This Page Intentionally Left Blank Preface This textbook is the outgrowth of a course on the physics of compact objects, which we have taught at Cornell University since 1975. As a class, compact stars consist of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. As the endpoint states of normal stellar evolution, they represent fundamental constituents of the physical Universe. This book, like the course itself, is a product of the burst of scientific activity commencing in the 1960s which centered on compact objects. During this period, pulsars and binary X-ray sources were discovered in our Galaxy. These discoveries proved to be milestones in the development of the field. They furnished definitive proof of the existence of neutron stars, which had previously existed only in the minds of a few theorists. They made plausible the possibility of black holes and even pointed to a few promising candidates in the night sky. More important, perhaps, these discoveries triggered new theoretical studies and observational programs designed to explore the physical nature of compact stars. A whole generation of experimental and theoretical physicists and astronomers has been trained to participate in t h s exciting, ongoing investigation. An area of active current research and great popular interest, the study of compact objects is far from complete. Not all-nor even most-of the basic questions concerning their structure and evolution are fully resolved. Neverthe- less, answers to these questions seem to be within our eventual reach. The field is now firmly established both as an observational and as a rigorous theoretical branch of physics. New information and new insights are generated constantly. Moreover, as compact objects undergo interactions involving all four of the fundamental forces of Nature, some of these insights should have an important impact on other branches of physics. Who could foresee, for example, that the question of whether or not nuclear matter makes a phase transition to a quark state at high density might be settled by observations made from an X-ray satellite! Our book is intended for beginning graduate students or advanced under- graduates in physics and astronomy. No prior knowledge of astrophysics or general relativity is assumed. Instead, we introduce the necessary concepts and vii