Effects of Strong Magnetic Fields on Neutron Star Structure

We study static neutron stars with poloidal magnetic fields and a simple class of electric current distributions consistent with the requirement of stationarity. For this class of electric current distributions, we find that magnetic fields are too large for static configurations to exist when the magnetic force pushes a sufficient amount of mass offcenter that the gravitational force points outward near the origin in the equatorial plane. (In our coordinates an outward gravitational force corresponds to ∂ ln gtt/∂r > 0, where t and r are respectively time and radial coordinates and gtt is coefficient of dt 2 in the line element.) For the equations of state (EOSs) employed in previous work, we obtain configurations of higher mass than had been reported; we also present results with more recent EOSs. For all EOSs studied, we find that the maximum mass among these static configurations with magnetic fields is noticeably larger than the maximum mass attainable by uniform rotation, and that for fixed values of baryon number the maximum mass configurations are all characterized by an off-center density maximum. Subject headings: stars: neutron — stars: magnetic fields