Roles of crust and core in the tidal deformability of neutron stars

Abstract

With the recent measurement of GW170817 providing constraints on the tidal deformability (TD) of a neutron star, it is very important to understand what features of the equation of state (EoS) have the biggest effect on it. We therefore study the contribution of the crust to the TD and the moment of inertia (MoI) of a neutron star for a variety of well-known EoS. It is found that the contributions to these quantities from the low-density crust are typically quite small and as a result the determination of the TD provides an important constraint on the EoS of dense matter.