11 Facts About Degenerate matter

Degenerate matter is a highly dense state of fermionic matter in which the Pauli exclusion principle exerts significant pressure in addition to, or in lieu of, thermal pressure.

The description applies to matter composed of electrons, protons, neutrons or other fermions.

Degenerate matter is usually modelled as an ideal Fermi gas, an ensemble of non-interacting fermions.

Milne proposed that degenerate matter is found in most of the nuclei of stars, not only in compact stars.

Likewise, degenerate matter still has normal thermal pressure, the degeneracy pressure dominates to the point that temperature has a negligible effect on the total pressure.

Exotic examples of degenerate matter include neutron degenerate matter, strange matter, metallic hydrogen and white dwarf matter.

Under high densities matter becomes a degenerate gas when all electrons are stripped from their parent atoms.

Degenerate matter gas is an almost perfect conductor of heat and does not obey ordinary gas laws.

Sufficiently dense matter containing protons experiences proton degeneracy pressure, in a manner similar to the electron degeneracy pressure in electron-degenerate matter: protons confined to a sufficiently small volume have a large uncertainty in their momentum due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Strange matter is a degenerate gas of quarks that is often assumed to contain strange quarks in addition to the usual up and down quarks.

The equations of state for the various proposed forms of quark-degenerate matter vary widely, and are usually poorly defined, due to the difficulty of modeling strong force interactions.