Thermonuclear Burst Oscillations

By A. Watts. 2012

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Burst oscillations, a phenomenon observed in a significant fraction of Type I (thermonuclear) X-ray bursts, involve the development of highly asymmetric brightness patches in the burning surface layers of accreting neutron stars. Intrinsically interesting as nuclear phenomena, they are also important as probes of dense matter physics and the strong gravity, high magnetic field environment of the neutron star surface. Burst oscillation frequency is also used to measure stellar spin, and doubles the sample of rapidly rotating (above 10 Hz) accreting neutron stars with known spins. Although the mechanism remains mysterious, burst oscillation models must take into account thermonuclear flame spread, nuclear processes, rapid rotation, and the dynamical role of the magnetic field. This review provides a comprehensive summary of the observational properties of burst oscillations, an assessment of the status of the theoretical models that are being developed to explain them, and an overview of how they can be use...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06ab4db4bd50761843b0e9c20fa7703b72b6ee32

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Lattimer
2. A. Steiner
3. A. Watts
4. S. Guillot
5. Dimitrios Psaltis
6. F. Özel
7. M. Miller
8. J. Steiner

In Geophysics

1. A. Watts
2. S. Guillot
3. J. Lattimer
4. A. Steiner
5. T. Strohmayer
6. J. Poutanen
7. M. Miller
8. F. Özel

Citations in the corpus

• Neutron star mass and radius measurements from atmospheric model fits to X-ray burst cooling tail spectra (2017, background): “In general, a burster is not expected to emit uniformly, and rotation rates of known bursters extend up to 620 Hz (Muno et al. 2002; Watts 2012).”
• The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “and data for nuclear-powered pulsars are from [124].”
• A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation (2019, background): “In accretion-powered pulsars (see Patruno & Watts 2012, for a review), accreting material is channeled by the magnetic field onto the magnetic polar caps and the pulsed emission has two main components: thermal emission from the heated vicinity of the accretion impact zones, and nonthermal emission…”
• Constraining the Neutron Star Mass–Radius Relation and Dense Matter Equation of State with NICER. I. The Millisecond Pulsar X-Ray Data Set (2019, background): “…emission, including nonthermal processes from poorly understood regions on and above the stellar surface (see, e.g., Hartman et al. 2008; Patruno & Watts 2012); or (ii) burst oscillation sources, which suffer, by comparison, from being extremely transient and from an uncertainty as to whether the…”
• Constraining the Neutron Star Mass–Radius Relation and Dense Matter Equation of State with NICER. II. Emission from Hot Spots on a Rapidly Rotating Neutron Star (2019, background): “…2003; Poutanen & Beloborodov 2006; Leahy et al. 2008, 2009, 2011; Morsink & Leahy 2011; Salmi et al. 2018a for recent models, and Patruno & Watts 2012 for a description of the observations); NSs that produce thermonuclear X-ray bursts that have millisecond brightness oscillations (see…”