White Dwarf Stars as Polytropic Gas Spheres

Abstract

We expect that relativistic effects play an important role in compact stars because their electrons are highly degenerate. In this paper, we study the properties of condensed matter in white dwarfs using Newtonian and relativistic polytropic fluid spheres. We propose two polytropic indices (n = 3 and n = 1.5) to investigate the physical characteristics of the models. We numerically solve the Lane-Emden equations and demonstrate that the relativistic effect is small in white dwarf stars.