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 [P. Bizon and T. Chmaj, Phys. Lett. B 297, 55 (1992).]. However, in this paper we demonstrate that by generating gravitating Skyrmions using rational maps, we can achieve multibaryon bound states while recovering spherical symmetry in the limit where B becomes large.