Browsing by Author "Annala, Eemeli"

At the moment, neutrons stars are some of the few objects in the Universe which allow us to study the physics of cold dense matter. This matter is denser than atomic nuclei and the thermal energy of its particles is much smaller than their Fermi energy. This kind of research is possible because the mass-radius behavior of the neutron star population depends strongly on the equation of state of neutron star matter. Unfortunately, precise enough radius measurements have not been available until very recently when simultaneous mass-radius measurements were developed. Since this development is still going on, no-one has yet combined these new kinds of measurements with perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) calculations, for example. This thesis has two main functions: Firstly, we want to present the current knowledge about neutron stars and cold dense matter. Secondly, we want to introduce a Bayesian method which connects astronomical observations and current pQCD results by using polytropes. In this fashion, it should be possible to further restrict the behavior of the equation of state of cold dense matter at neutron star densities. Nevertheless, a detailed examination of this approach is left to future studies.