MG11 
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Abstract

The Dense Matter Equation of State and Neutron Star Observables

Hot dense matter, as was present during the first microsecond of the Universe life, is being probed by RHIC at Brookhaven and has been found to form a perfect quark liquid. However, cold dense matter cannot be produced in terrestrial laboratories and is only present in the deepest interiors of neutron stars. I will survey the theoretical models which have been proposed to describe such dense cold matter, from standard n-p-e matter, passing through meson condensates and hyperonic matter up to self-bound strange quark matter, and present their possible observable signatures.

Thermal evolution of strange stars

I will describe the cooling evolution of a strange star in the two possible scenarios of a bare quark surface or in presence of a thin baryonic crust. In the case of a bare strange star, its thermal luminosity is dominated by pair production when the surface temperature is below 10 MeV and eventually photon emission by e-e bremsstrahlung from the "electrosphere" takes over. The corresponding luminosities are highly super-Eddington. In case some of the detected isolated cooling "neutron" stars are actually strange stars with a crust, present observational data strongly constrain the state of strange matter and allow to refine predictions for the bare star cases.