Unifying the observational diversity of isolated neutron stars via magneto-thermal evolution models.

By D. Viganò, N. Rea, José A. Pons, R. Perna, D. Aguilera, J. A. M. U. d'Alacant, CSIC--IEEC Barcelona, JILAUniversity of Colorado, CNEA-Buenos Aires. 2013

372 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Observations of magnetars and some of the high magnetic field pulsars have shown that their thermal luminosity is systematically higher than that of classical radiopulsars, thus confirming the idea that magnetic fields are involved in their X-ray emission. Here we present the results of 2D simulations of the fully-coupled evolution of temperature and magnetic field in neutron stars, including the state-of-the-art kinetic coefficients and, for the first time, the important effect of the Hall term. After gathering and thoroughly re-analysing in a consistent way all the best available data on isolated, thermally emitting neutron stars, we compare our theoretical models to a data sample of 40 sources. We find that our evolutionary models can explain the phenomenological diversity of magnetars, high-B radio-pulsars, and isolated nearby neutron stars by only varying their initial magnetic field, mass and envelope composition. Nearly all sources appear to follow the expectations of the standard theoretical models. Finally, we discuss the expected outburst rates and the evolutionary links between different classes. Our results constitute a major step towards the grand unification of the isolated neutron star zoo.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8168a3286c2f986bfa01e38b6afed5a19fd90577

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Watts
2. S. Guillot
3. D. Page
4. José A. Pons
5. J. Lattimer
6. T. Strohmayer
7. W. Ho
8. A. Harding

In Geophysics

1. A. Watts
2. S. Guillot
3. D. Page
4. T. Strohmayer
5. José A. Pons
6. A. Potekhin
7. T. E. Riley
8. J. Lattimer

Citations in the corpus

• Neutron Stars—Cooling and Transport (2015, methodology): “12 we compare the observational data to theoretical cooling curves, from Viganò et al. (2013).”
• Fast radio burst source properties and curvature radiation model (2017, background): “The empirical age of Galactic magnetars is ∼ 103 to 104 yr (e.g. Viganò et al. 2013), which may be taken as the upper limit of the age of the FRB progenitor.”
• A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation (2019, background): “…complex as a result of the supernova process (Ardeljan et al. 2005; Obergaulinger & Aloy 2017) but various diffusive evolutionary processes can subsequently modify field structure even for isolated NSs (Reisenegger 2009; Viganò et al. 2013; Mitchell et al. 2015; Gourgouliatos & Hollerbach 2018).”
• THE McGILL MAGNETAR CATALOG (2013, background): “Indeed, models of magnetic and thermal evolution in neutron stars are suggestive of an evolutionary relationship between magnetars and XINSs, with the latter descendants of the former (Vigano et al. 2013; Popov et al. 2010).”