Congrats to Ph.D. student Omair Zubairi who won 2nd place (Qualcomm Award) at the SDSU Computational Science Research Center’s 11th Annual ACSESS poster session for his poster entitled “Non-Spherical Stellar Models of Compact Stars” Omair Zubairi works with Professor Fridolin Weber in the areas of General Relativity and numerical Astrophysics. Read his abstract below:
Conventionally, the structure of compact stellar objects such as neutron or quark stars are modeled with the assumption that they are perfect spheres. However, due to high magnetic fields, certain classes of compact stars (such as magnetars and neutron stars containing cores of color-superconducting quark matter) are expected to be deformed (non-spherical) making them oblonged spheroids. In this work, we seek to investigate the stellar structure of these such deformed compact objects in the framework of generalrelativity. Using a metric that describes a non-spherical mass distribution, we derive the stellar structures equations of these non-spherical compact objects, Parameterize these structure equations in polar and radial directions, calculate stellar properties such as mass and radii of these objects, and investigate any changes from the standard spherical models.