PSR J0030+0451 Mass and Radius from NICER Data and Implications for the Properties of Neutron Star Matter

By M. Miller, F. Lamb, A. Dittmann, S. Bogdanov, Z. Arzoumanian, K. Gendreau, S. Guillot, A. Harding, W. C. G. Ho, J. Lattimer and 11 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

1,457 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neutron stars are not only of astrophysical interest, but are also of great interest to nuclear physicists because their attributes can be used to determine the properties of the dense matter in their cores. One of the most informative approaches for determining the equation of state (EoS) of this dense matter is to measure both a star’s equatorial circumferential radius Re and its gravitational mass M. Here we report estimates of the mass and radius of the isolated 205.53 Hz millisecond pulsar PSR J0030+0451 obtained using a Bayesian inference approach to analyze its energy-dependent thermal X-ray waveform, which was observed using the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). This approach is thought to be less subject to systematic errors than other approaches for estimating neutron star radii. We explored a variety of emission patterns on the stellar surface. Our best-fit model has three oval, uniform-temperature emitting spots and provides an excellent description of the pulse waveform observed using NICER. The radius and mass estimates given by this model are km and (68%). The independent analysis reported in the companion paper by Riley et al. explores different emitting spot models, but finds spot shapes and locations and estimates of Re and M that are consistent with those found in this work. We show that our measurements of Re and M for PSR J0030+0451 improve the astrophysical constraints on the EoS of cold, catalyzed matter above nuclear saturation density.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b738e48fe0e6ccac6e5d1c76e9b6c3bdd22ce093

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Citations in the corpus

A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Implications for the Dense Matter Equation of State (2019, methodology): “19 For an independent analysis of the same data set using different modeling choices and methodology see Miller et al. (2019b), which follows the approach outlined in (Miller et al. 2019a).”
Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M ⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star (2024, methodology): “To assess the effect of the EoS constraint used for source classification (Section 6) and calculation of f EM-bright (Section 7), we repeat these analyses using GP-EoS constraints additionally conditioned on NICER observations (Legred et al. 2021, 2022) of J0030+0451 (Miller et al. 2019; Riley et al”
Progress in Constraining Nuclear Symmetry Energy Using Neutron Star Observables Since GW170817 (2021, methodology): “24 M [103] for PSR J0030+0451 from NICER Collaboration.”
An Updated Mass–Radius Analysis of the 2017–2018 NICER Data Set of PSR J0030+0451 (2023, methodology): “…the mass and radius inferred by R19 for PSR J0030 + 0451 was M 1.34 0.160.15 -+  and 12.71 1.191.14 -+ km, where the uncertainties, here and throughout this work, are speci ﬁ ed at approximately the 16% and 84% quantiles in the 1D marginal posterior ( for comparison, Miller et al. 2019 km ) .”
A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Evidence for a Global-scale Multipolar Magnetic Field (2019, methodology): “…cannot be explained with a canonical global-scale centered dipolar mag- 1 An independent analysis of the same data has also been carried out by Miller et al. (2019); these authors report similar hot region geometry and properties using different models and methodology. netic field…”
On the Sound Speed in Neutron Stars (2022, methodology): “In addition, we impose the radius measurements by NICER of J0740+6620 (Miller et al. 2021; Riley et al. 2021) and of J0030+0451 (Riley et al. 2019; Miller et al. 2019) by rejecting EOSs with R< 10.75 km at M= 2.0Me and R< 10.8 km at M= 1.1Me, respectively (see Figure 6 in the Appendix).”