Abstract

The electrostatic potential that keeps approximate charge neutrality in neutron star matter is self-consistently introduced into the formalism for "rotochemical heating" presented in a previous paper by Fernández and Reisenegger. Although the new formalism is more rigorous, we show that its observable consequences are indistinguishable from those of the previous one, leaving the conclusions of the previous paper unchanged. © 2006. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.