A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation

By T. E. Riley, A. Watts, S. Bogdanov, P. Ray, R. Ludlam, S. Guillot, Z. Arzoumanian, C. Baker, A. Bilous, D. Chakrabarty and 6 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

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We report on Bayesian parameter estimation of the mass and equatorial radius of the millisecond pulsar PSR J0030+0451, conditional on pulse-profile modeling of Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer X-ray spectral-timing event data. We perform relativistic ray-tracing of thermal emission from hot regions of the pulsar’s surface. We assume two distinct hot regions based on two clear pulsed components in the phase-folded pulse-profile data; we explore a number of forms (morphologies and topologies) for each hot region, inferring their parameters in addition to the stellar mass and radius. For the family of models considered, the evidence (prior predictive probability of the data) strongly favors a model that permits both hot regions to be located in the same rotational hemisphere. Models wherein both hot regions are assumed to be simply connected circular single-temperature spots, in particular those where the spots are assumed to be reflection-symmetric with respect to the stellar origin, are strongly disfavored. For the inferred configuration, one hot region subtends an angular extent of only a few degrees (in spherical coordinates with origin at the stellar center) and we are insensitive to other structural details; the second hot region is far more azimuthally extended in the form of a narrow arc, thus requiring a larger number of parameters to describe. The inferred mass M and equatorial radius Req are, respectively, 1.34 − 0.16 + 0.15 M ⊙ and 12.71 − 1.19 + 1.14 km , while the compactness GM / R eq c 2 = 0.156 − 0.010 + 0.008 is more tightly constrained; the credible interval bounds reported here are approximately the 16% and 84% quantiles in marginal posterior mass.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00cc8a92c511785d1436370e5c3fd452832697af

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Citations in the corpus

A NICER View of the Massive Pulsar PSR J0740+6620 Informed by Radio Timing and XMM-Newton Spectroscopy (2021, methodology): “…procedure has not been validated in any meaningful way via simulation-based calibration because at present it is basically intractable for any one group to calibrate credible region coverage on a model-by-model basis (see the discussion in chapter 3 of Riley 2019 and in Riley et al. 2019).”
An Updated Mass–Radius Analysis of the 2017–2018 NICER Data Set of PSR J0030+0451 (2023, methodology): “We also report in ocher the posterior identi ﬁ ed by Riley et al. ( 2019 ) for the ST +PST model.”
Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M ⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star (2024, methodology): “…(Section 7), we repeat these analyses using GP-EoS constraints additionally conditioned on NICER observations (Legred et al. 2021, 2022) of J0030+0451 (Miller et al. 2019; Riley et al. 2019; Vinciguerra et al. 2024) and J0740+6620 (Miller et al. 2021; Riley et al. 2021; Salmi et al. 2022, 2023).”
The Radius of the High-mass Pulsar PSR J0740+6620 with 3.6 yr of NICER Data (2024, methodology): “The shapes of the hot emitting regions are again characterized using the ST-U ( Single-Temperature-Unshared ) model with two circular uniform temperature regions (Riley et al. 2019).”