NEUTRON STAR MASSES AND RADII FROM QUIESCENT LOW-MASS X-RAY BINARIES

By J. Lattimer, A. Steiner. 2013

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We perform a systematic analysis of neutron star radius constraints from five quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries and examine how they depend on measurements of their distances and amounts of intervening absorbing material, as well as their assumed atmospheric compositions. We construct and calibrate to published results a semi-analytic model of the neutron star atmosphere which approximates these effects for the predicted masses and radii. Starting from mass and radius probability distributions established from hydrogen-atmosphere spectral fits of quiescent sources, we apply this model to compute alternate sets of probability distributions. We perform Bayesian analyses to estimate neutron star mass–radius curves and equation of state (EOS) parameters that best-fit each set of distributions, assuming the existence of a known low-density neutron star crustal EOS, a simple model for the high-density EOS, causality, and the observation that the neutron star maximum mass exceeds 2 M☉. We compute the posterior probabilities for each set of distance measurements and assumptions about absorption and composition. We find that, within the context of our assumptions and our parameterized EOS models, some absorption models are disfavored. We find that neutron stars composed of hadrons are favored relative to those with exotic matter with strong phase transitions. In addition, models in which all five stars have hydrogen atmospheres are found to be weakly disfavored. Our most likely models predict neutron star radii that are consistent with current experimental results concerning the nature of the nucleon–nucleon interaction near the nuclear saturation density.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d6897ada410500145fae1d6fb9ccee77f29ceb3

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Constraining the mass and radius of neutron stars in globular clusters (2017, methodology): “This method is superior to that employed in Lattimer & Steiner (2014b) because it allows us to quantitatively predict the posterior probability that any particular neutron star has a H or He atmosphere.”
Unified equation of state for neutron stars on a microscopic basis (2015, methodology): “For completeness, we also display in the orange hatched band the probability distribution for MG and R deduced from five PRE (Photospheric Radius Expansion) burst sources and five QLMXB sources, after a Bayesian analysis (Lattimer & Steiner 2014a).”
A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Implications for the Dense Matter Equation of State (2019, background): “Steiner et al. (2010, 2013, 2018) and Lattimer & Steiner (2014) considered a larger range of parameterized EoS models to infer dense matter parameters including those associated with the nuclear symmetry energy and the mass–radius bands.”
The Nuclear Symmetry Energy (2016, result): “Although more studies could be needed [118], these results, if confirmed, would pose serious constraints on the overall behaviour of the symmetry energy, pointing in the direction of a moderate increase of the symmetry energy as a function of density.”
THE DENSE MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FROM NEUTRON STAR RADIUS AND MASS MEASUREMENTS (2015, methodology): “…more recent parametric forms of the equation of state that do not rely on particular nuclear physics models (e.g., Read et al. 2009; Özel & Psaltis 2009; Steiner et al. 2010; Lattimer & Steiner 2014b) allow us to put this inversion into practice even without sampling the entire mass-radius curve.”