Electromagnetic and anisotropic extension of a plethora of well-known solutions describing relativistic compact objects.

We demonstrate a technique to generate new class of exact solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell system describing a static spherically symmetric relativistic star with anisotropic matter distribution. An interesting feature of the new class of solutions is that one can easily switch off the electric and/or anisotropic effects in this formulation. Consequently, we show that a plethora of well known stellar solutions can be identified as sub-class of our class of solutions. We demonstrate that it is possible to express our class of solutions in a simple closed form so as to examine its physical viability for the studies of relativistic compact stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]