The maximal gravitational mass of nonrotating neutron stars ($M_{\mathrm{TOV}}$) is one of the key parameters of compact objects and only loose bounds can be set based on the first principle. With reliable measurements of the masses and/or radii of the neutron stars, $M_{\mathrm{TOV}}$ can be robustly inferred from either the mass distribution of these objects or the reconstruction of the equation of state of the very dense matter. For the first time we take the advantages of both two approaches to have a precise inference of $M_{\mathrm{TOV}}=2.25_{-0.07}^{+0.08}{M}_{\odot }$ (68.3% credibility), with the updated neutron star mass measurement sample, the mass-tidal deformability data of GW170817, the mass-radius data of PSR $\mathrm{J}0030+0451$ and PSR $\mathrm{J}0740+6620$, as well as the theoretical information from the chiral effective theory and perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) at low- and very high-energy densities, respectively. This narrow credible range is benefited from the suppression of the high $M_{\mathrm{TOV}}$ by the pQCD constraint and the exclusion of the low $M_{\mathrm{TOV}}$ by the mass function. Three different EoS reconstruction methods are adopted separately, and the resulting $M_{\mathrm{TOV}}$ and $R_{\mathrm{TOV}}$ are found to be almost identical, where $R_{\mathrm{TOV}}=11.90_{-0.60}^{+0.63}\mathrm{km}$ is the radius of the most massive nonrotating neutron star. This precisely evaluated $M_{\mathrm{TOV}}$ suggests that the EoS of neutron star matter is just moderately stiff and the $\sim 2.5–3M_{\odot }$ compact objects detected by the second-generation gravitational wave detectors are most likely the lightest black holes.

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• Gravitational wave sources
• Neutron stars & pulsars