Role of Hyperons in Neutron Stars

The latest observation of a Shapiro delay of the binary millisecond pulsar J1614-2230 by Demorest et al. Nature 467 1081 (2010) yielded the pulsar gravitational mass to be 1.97 +/- 0.04 solar mass, the heaviest observed pulsar to-date. This result produces a stringent constraint on Equation(s) of State (EoS) of high density neutron star matter. One of the main conclusions of Demorest et al. was that their result makes the presence of non-nucleonic components in the neutron star matter unlikely. We compare the result with our recent work and conclude that hyperons in high-density matter are fully consistent with the observation and that their presence is a necessary consequence of general physical laws.