On the maximum accretion luminosity of magnetized neutron stars: connecting X-ray pulsars and ultraluminous X-ray sources
By A. Mushtukov, V. Suleimanov, S. Tsygankov, J. Poutanen. 2015
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study properties of luminous X-ray pulsars using a simplified model of the accretion column. The maximal possible luminosity is calculated as a function of the neutron star (NS) magnetic field and spin period. It is shown that the luminosity can reach values of the order of $10^{40}\,{\rm erg/s}$ for the magnetar-like magnetic field ($B\gtrsim 10^{14}\,{\rm G}$) and long spin periods ($P\gtrsim 1.5\,{\rm s}$). The relative narrowness of an area of feasible NS parameters which are able to provide higher luminosities leads to the conclusion that $L\simeq 10^{40}\,\,{\rm erg/s}$ is a good estimate for the limiting accretion luminosity of a NS. Because this luminosity coincides with the cut-off observed in the high mass X-ray binaries luminosity function which otherwise does not show any features at lower luminosities, we can conclude that a substantial part of ultra-luminous X-ray sources are accreting neutron stars in binary systems.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2112028fe051ee5220e89c252c6d6f188c0d6a4
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, background): “…et al. 2016; Israel et al. 2017a) has lead to the suggestion that ULXs might be HMXBs (Ekşi et al. 2015; Kluźniak & Lasota 2015; Shao & Li 2015; Mushtukov et al. 2015), including BeHMXBs (Karino & Miller 2016; Christodoulou et al. 2017), and which could therefore suggest that some ULXs…”
- DISCOVERY OF COHERENT PULSATIONS FROM THE ULTRALUMINOUS X-RAY SOURCE NGC 7793 P13 (2016, background): “A very highly magnetized (magnetar-like) neutron star has also been invoked to explain the extreme luminosity of M82 X-2 (e.g., Ekşi et al. 2015; Dall’Osso et al. 2015; Mushtukov et al. 2015).”