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In the study of degenerate plasmas contained within compact astrophysical objects, both special relativity and general relativity play important roles. After reviewing the existing treatment in the literature, here we employ the methods of relativistic thermal quantum field theory to compute the equation of states of degenerate matter for compact astrophysical objects such as the white dwarfs and the neutron stars. In particular, we compute the equation of states that include leading order corrections due to the finite temperature, the fine-structure constant as well as the effect of gravitational time dilation. We show that the fine-structure constant correction remains well-defined even in the non-relativistic regime in contrast to the existing treatment in the literature., 9 pages, 3 figures, revtex; v2 a detailed comparison with existing treatment added, review is shortened, discussion improved, a new ref. added; v3 16 pages, 7 figures, significantly updated, title changed, to be appearing in Reviews of Modern Plasma Physics

We compute the equation of state for an ensemble of degenerate fermions by using the curved spacetime of a slowly rotating axially symmetric star. We show that the equation of state computed in such curved spacetime depends on the gravitational time dilation as well as on the dragging of inertial frames, unlike an equation of state computed in a globally flat spacetime. The effect of gravitational time dilation leads to a significant enhancement of the maximum mass limit of a degenerate neutron star. However, such an enhancement due to the frame-dragging effect is extremely small. Nevertheless, in general relativity the frame-dragging effect is crucial for computing angular momentum of the star which is also shown to be enhanced significantly due to the usage of curved spacetime in computing the equation of state., Comment: v1 9 pages, 4 figures, revtex4; v2 10 pages, 6 figures, matches with published version