MAPPING CRUSTAL HEATING WITH THE COOLING LIGHT CURVES OF QUASI-PERSISTENT TRANSIENTS
By Edward F. Brown, Andrew Cumming. 2009
181 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The monitoring of quiescent emission from neutron star transients with accretion outbursts long enough to significantly heat the neutron star crust has opened a new vista onto the physics of dense matter. In this paper, we construct models of the thermal relaxation of the neutron star crust following the end of a protracted accretion outburst. We confirm the finding of Shternin et al., that the thermal conductivity of the neutron star crust is high, consistent with a low impurity parameter. We describe the basic physics that sets the broken power-law form of the cooling light curve. The initial power-law decay gives a direct measure of the temperature profile, and hence the thermal flux during outburst, in the outer crust. The time of the break, at hundreds of days postoutburst, corresponds to the thermal time where the solid transitions from a classical to quantum crystal, close to neutron drip. We calculate in detail the constraints on the crust parameters of both KS 1731−260 and MXB 1659−29 from fitting their cooling light curves. Our fits to the light curves require that the neutrons do not contribute significantly to the heat capacity in the inner crust, and provide evidence in favor of the existence of a neutron superfluid throughout the inner crust. Our fits to both sources indicate an impurity parameter of order unity in the inner crust.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a112cd545815904786d4ac7f1de7b64c8cd65b1b
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- THE EQUATION OF STATE FROM OBSERVED MASSES AND RADII OF NEUTRON STARS (2010, unknown): “Measurements of he thickness of the neutron star crust, which controls the crust cooling of transiently accreting LMXBs (Shternin et al. 2007; Brown & Cumming 2009) as well as the distribution of observed cooling curves compared to a minimal cooling model (e.g., Page et al. 2009), could also…”
- Neutron Stars—Cooling and Transport (2015, background): “…can be interpreted in terms of this hypothesis and yield constraints to the heat conductivity in the neutron-star crust, as, e.g., for KS 1731–260 (Shternin et al. 2007; Brown and Cumming 2009), XTE J1701–462 (Fridriksson et al. 2011; Page and Reddy 2013), EXO 0748–676 (Turlione et al. 2015).”