Towards Skyrmion Stars: Large Baryon Configurations in the Einstein-Skyrme Model

We investigate the large baryon number sector of the Einstein-Skyrme model as a possible model for baryon stars. Gravitating hedgehog skyrmions have been investigated previously and the existence of stable solitonic stars excluded due to energy considerations. However, in this paper we demonstrate that by generating gravitating skyrmions using rational maps, we can achieve multi-baryon bound states whilst recovering spherical symmetry in the limit where B becomes large.