Degenerate Stars and Dark Horizons: A Narrative Review of Compact Objects' Literature --- White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, and Black Holes
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Compact objects are physics' confirmation instruments: matter tested at densities no laboratory reaches, gravity tested in its strongest fields, and each class --- white dwarf, neutron star, black hole --- named by the physics that holds when the others fail. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that testing. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the white dwarfs' and neutron stars' theory, in which Liebert's white-dwarf review, Oppenheimer and Volkoff's massive neutron cores, the Hewish discovery of pulsars, Gold's rotating-neutron-star interpretation, Demorest's two-solar-mass measurement, and Lorimer's pulsar synthesis fixed the degeneracy ladder --- electron, neutron, and the equation of state's constraining maximum; the magnetars' extreme, in which Duncan and Thompson's strongly magnetized neutron stars completed the zoo; and the black holes' settlement, in which Schwarzschild's solution, Penrose's singularity theorem, Casares and Jonker's mass measurements, Abbott's gravitational-wave observation, and Shapiro and Teukolsky's compact-object treatise turned the horizon from calculation to observation. It is concluded that the literature describes a single instrument --- compactness as physics' extreme probe --- whose classes are the equation of state's successive failures and whose union, from degenerate matter to the event horizon, is general relativity and quantum statistics' shared laboratory.
Authors: Revista, Zen, ASTRO, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204835256