Cooling of neutron stars

On the basis of current physical understanding, it is impossible to predict with confidence the interior constitution of neutron stars. Cooling of neutron stars provides a possible way of discriminating among possible states of matter within them. In the standard picture of cooling by neutrino emission developed over the past quarter of a century, neutron stars are expected to cool relatively slowly if their cores are made up of nucleons, and to cool faster if matter is in an exotic state, such as a pion condensate, a kaon condensate, or quark matter. This view has recently been called into question by the discovery of a number of other processes that could lead to copious neutrino emission and rapid cooling.