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

By S. Bogdanov, F. Lamb, S. Mahmoodifar, M. Miller, S. Morsink, T. E. Riley, T. Strohmayer, A. Tung, A. Watts, A. Dittmann and 4 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe the model of surface emission from a rapidly rotating neutron star that is applied to Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer X-ray data of millisecond pulsars in order to statistically constrain the neutron star mass–radius relation and dense matter equation of state. To ensure that the associated calculations are both accurate and precise, we conduct an extensive suite of verification tests between our numerical codes for both the Schwarzschild + Doppler and Oblate Schwarzschild approximations, and compare both approximations against exact numerical calculations. We find superb agreement between the code outputs, as well as in comparisons against a set of analytical and semi-analytical calculations, which, combined with their speed, demonstrates that the codes are well suited for large-scale statistical sampling applications. A set of verified, high-precision reference synthetic pulse profiles is provided to the community to facilitate testing of other independently developed codes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/919e46f1386443e862bce2e8cce082adb65d9446

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

Citations in the corpus

• Constraining the Neutron Star Mass–Radius Relation and Dense Matter Equation of State with NICER. I. The Millisecond Pulsar X-Ray Data Set (2019, methodology): “In Bogdanov et al. (2019), Paper II, we present the approach and codes we use to describe the propagation of the photons emitted from the surface to the observer, while S. Bogdanov et al. (2019, in preparation), Paper III, describes all other aspects of the modeling technique applied to the NICER…”
• A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation (2019, methodology): “As discussed in the appendix of Bogdanov et al. (2019b), the X-PSI implementation (referred to as the AMS code in Bogdanov et al. 2019b) of a radiating region is specialized for fast likelihood function evaluation when said function is a callback for sampling processes: whilst numerical…”
• PSR J0030+0451 Mass and Radius from NICER Data and Implications for the Properties of Neutron Star Matter (2019, methodology): “Computations of pulse waveforms like those used here were verified by members of the NICER Lightcurve Working Group, as described in Bogdanov et al. (2019b).”
• An Updated Mass–Radius Analysis of the 2017–2018 NICER Data Set of PSR J0030+0451 (2023, methodology): “What we present here is the analysis of a revised NICER data set ( hereafter B19v006 ) , derived from the one presented in Bogdanov et al. ( 2019a ) and covering the same observations, but modi fi ed to be consistent with the latest NICER response matrix.”
• The Radius of the High-mass Pulsar PSR J0740+6620 with 3.6 yr of NICER Data (2024, methodology): “One way to infer mass and radius is to model the X-ray pulses produced by hot regions on the surface of a rapidly rotating NS including relativistic effects (see, e.g., Watts et al. 2016; Bogdanov et al. 2019, and references therein).”