Placing Bounds on Nuclear Matter Parameters using NICER Measurements of J0030

The NICER telescope recently made the first direct simultaneous measurement of the mass $M$ and radius $R$ of the neutron star PSR J0030+0451. We utilize this measurement to place bounds on the supranuclear equation of state (EoS). We construct a population of theory-agnostic EoSs by expressing the binding energy per nucleon as a Taylor expansion in nucleon number density and isospin symmetry. By randomly sampling each of the parameters in the Taylor expansion and excluding non-physical combinations, we generate a population of 100,000 possible EoSs. By numerically solving the properties of the NS described by each EoS, we construct conditional probability distributions relating the measurable quantities $M$ and $R$ to the nuclear parameters such as $K_{sym,0}$ that govern the EoS. A marginalization routine is used to place bounds on the values of $K_{sym,0}$ that are consistent with measurements of J0030.