THE DISTANCE, MASS, AND RADIUS OF THE NEUTRON STAR IN 4U 1608−52

By T. Güver, F. Özel, A. Cabrera-Lavers, P. Wroblewski. 2008

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) that show thermonuclear bursts are ideal sources for constraining the equation of state of neutron star matter. The lack of independent distance measurements for most of these sources, however, prevent a systematic exploration of the masses and radii of the neutron stars, hence limiting the equation-of-state studies. We present here a measurement of the distance to the LMXB 4U 1608−52 that is based on the study of the interstellar extinction toward the source. We first model the individual absorption edges of the elements Ne and Mg in the high-resolution X-ray spectrum obtained with XMM-Newton. We then combine this information with a measurement of the run of reddening with distance using red clump stars and determine a minimum distance to the source of 3.9 kpc, with a most probable value of 5.8 kpc. Finally, we analyze time-resolved X-ray spectra of Type I X-ray bursts observed from this source to measure the mass and the radius of the neutron star. We find a mass of M = 1.74 ± 0.14 M☉ and a radius of R = 9.3 ± 1.0 km, respectively. This mass and radius can be achieved by several multi-nucleon equations of state.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/528666ff87bd142c1a8ef8525c9e2f2f074ccf8f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Lattimer
2. A. Steiner
3. S. Guillot
4. F. Özel
5. T. Güver
6. C. Heinke
7. Dimitrios Psaltis
8. E. Brown

Citations in the corpus

• NEUTRON STAR MASSES AND RADII FROM QUIESCENT LOW-MASS X-RAY BINARIES (2013, methodology): “In addition, they have been largely modeled (Özel, Güver & Psaltis 2009; Güver et al. 2010a,b; Özel, Baym & Güver 2010; Steiner, Lattimer & Brown 2010; Özel, Gould & Güver 2012; Suleimanov, Poutanen & Werner 2011; Steiner, Lattimer & Brown 2013) with static atmospheres but are certainly…”
• Neutron star mass and radius measurements from atmospheric model fits to X-ray burst cooling tail spectra (2017, methodology): “…radius R from burst cooling tails, both of which stem from the earlier work: the touchdown method (e.g., Özel 2006; Özel et al. 2009; Güver et al. 2010; Özel et al. 2016) and the cooling tail method (e.g., Suleimanov et al. 2011a; Poutanen et al. 2014; Nättilä et al. 2016;…”
• Constraining the mass and radius of neutron stars in globular clusters (2017, background): “Steiner et al. (2010) combined mass-radius constraints from three thermonuclear burst systems (Özel et al. 2009; Güver et al. 2010a,b) with results from three quiescent LMXBs (Heinke et al. 2006b; Webb & Barret 2007).”
• Constraints on perturbative f(R) gravity via neutron stars (2010, methodology): “These data are provided by the measurements on the neutron stars EXO 1745-248 [44], 4U 1608-52 [45] and 4U 1820-30 [46] by the methods described in the cited papers.”
• THE DENSE MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FROM NEUTRON STAR RADIUS AND MASS MEASUREMENTS (2015, methodology): “Without any further information to choose between the optical and the near-IR measurements, Güver et al. (2010b) combined them into a single boxcar likelihood between 6.8 to 9.6 kpc, which placed more than warranted likelihoods at the shortest and intermediate distances.”
• MEASUREMENT OF THE RADIUS OF NEUTRON STARS WITH HIGH SIGNAL-TO-NOISE QUIESCENT LOW-MASS X-RAY BINARIES IN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS (2012, unknown): “The LMXBs EXO 1745-248, 4U 1608-52, and 4U 1820- 30 were found to have respective radii in the 2σ ranges RNS = [7.5 − 11.0] km (Özel et al. 2009), RNS = [7.5 − 11.5] km (Güver et al. 2010a) and RNS = [8.5 − 9.5] km (Güver et al. 2010b), respectively.”
• THE EQUATION OF STATE FROM OBSERVED MASSES AND RADII OF NEUTRON STARS (2010, methodology): “Touchdown flux: Five of the bursts have a measured touchdown flux:FTD,∞/(10−8 ergs cm−2 s−2) = 5.33±0.27, 5.65±0.20, 5.12±0.15, 5.24±0.19, and 5.42±0.16 (Güver et al. 2010b).”
• ON THE MASS DISTRIBUTION AND BIRTH MASSES OF NEUTRON STARS (2012, unknown): “This category includes 4U 1745−248 (Özel et al. 2009), 4U 1608−52 (Güver et al. 2010a), 4U 1820−30 (Güver et al. 2010b), and KS 1731−260 (Özel et al. 2012).”
• Strange star equation of state fits the refined mass measurement of 12 pulsars and predicts their radii (2013, background): “In a recent work, Güver et al. (2010a) used time resolved X-ray Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/431/4/3216/1142246 by guest on 29 July 2018 spectroscopy of the thermonuclear burst of 4U 1820−30, and side by side they measured the distance of the globular cluster NGC…”
• THE NEUTRON STAR MASS DISTRIBUTION (2010, background): “NSs in X-ray binaries also show systematic deviations from the canonical mass limit (e.g., van Kerkwijk et al. 1995; Barziv et al. 2001; Quaintrell et al. 2003; van der Meer et al. 2005; Özel et al. 2009; Güver et al. 2010).”
• THE MASS AND RADIUS OF THE NEUTRON STAR IN 4U 1820−30 (2010, methodology): “Following Özel et al. (2009) and Güver et al. (2010), we determined the touchdown flux as the bolometric flux measured when the normalization of the blackbody obtains its lowest value and the temperature reaches its highest value.”