There are strong indications that the process of conversion of a neutron star into a strange quark star proceeds as a strong deflagration implying that in a few milliseconds almost the whole star is converted. Starting from the three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the combustion process which provide the temperature profiles inside the newly born strange star, we calculate for the first time the neutrino signal that is to be expected if such a conversion process takes place. The neutrino emission is characterized by a luminosity and a duration that is typical for the signal expected from protoneutron stars and represents therefore a powerful source of neutrinos which could be possibly directly detected in case of events occurring close to our Galaxy. We discuss moreover possible connections between the birth of strange stars and explosive phenomena such as supernovae and gamma-ray-bursts.
Interactions with neutrons and protons play a crucial role for the neutrino opacity of matter in the supernova core. Their current implementation in many simulation codes, however, is rather schematic and ignores not only modifications for the correlated nuclear medium of the nascent neutron star, but also free-space corrections from nucleon recoil, weak magnetism or strange quarks, which can easily add up to changes of several 10% for neutrino energies in the spectral peak. In the Garching supernova simulations with the Prometheus-Vertex code, such sophistications have been included for a long time except for the strange-quark contributions to the nucleon spin, which affect neutral-current neutrino scattering. We demonstrate on the basis of a 20 M_sun progenitor star that a moderate strangeness-dependent contribution of g_a^s = -0.2 to the axial-vector coupling constant g_a = 1.26 can turn an unsuccessful three-dimensional (3D) model into a successful explosion. Such a modification is in the direction of current experimental results and reduces the neutral-current scattering opacity of neutrons, which dominate in the medium around and above the neutrinosphere. This leads to increased luminosities and mean energies of all neutrino species and strengthens the neutrino-energy deposition in the heating layer. Higher nonradial kinetic energy in the gain layer signals enhanced buoyancy activity that enables the onset of the explosion at ~300 ms after bounce, in contrast to the model with vanishing strangeness contributions to neutrino-nucleon scattering. Our results demonstrate the close proximity to explosion of the previously published, unsuccessful 3D models of the Garching group.
In accreting neutron star X-ray transients, the neutron star crust can be substantially heated out of thermal equilibrium with the core during an accretion outburst. The observed subsequent cooling in quiescence (when accretion has halted) offers a unique opportunity to study the structure and thermal properties of the crust. Initially crust cooling modelling studies focussed on transient X-ray binaries with prolonged accretion outbursts (> 1 year) such that the crust would be significantly heated for the cooling to be detectable. Here we present the results of applying a theoretical model to the observed cooling curve after a short accretion outburst of only ~10 weeks. In our study we use the 2010 outburst of the transiently accreting 11 Hz X-ray pulsar in the globular cluster Terzan 5. Observationally it was found that the crust in this source was still hot more than 4 years after the end of its short accretion outburst. From our modelling we found that such a long-lived hot crust implies some unusual crustal properties such as a very low thermal conductivity (> 10 times lower than determined for the other crust cooling sources). In addition, we present our preliminary results of the modelling of the ongoing cooling of the neutron star in MXB 1659-298. This transient X-ray source went back into quiescence in March 2017 after an accretion phase of ~1.8 years. We compare our predictions for the cooling curve after this outburst with the cooling curve of the same source obtained after its previous outburst which ended in 2001.
We describe an unambiguous gravitational-wave signature to identify the occurrence of a strong phase transition from hadronic matter to deconfined quark matter in neutron star mergers. Such a phase transition leads to a strong softening of the equation of state and hence to more compact merger remnants compared to purely hadronic models. If a phase transition takes place during merging, this results in a characteristic increase of the dominant postmerger gravitational-wave frequency relative to the tidal deformability characterizing the inspiral phase. By comparing results from different purely hadronic and hybrid models we show that a strong phase transition can be identified from a single, simultaneous measurement of pre- and postmerger gravitational waves. Furthermore, we present new results for hybrid star mergers, which contain quark matter already during the inspiral stage. Also for these systems we find that the postmerger GW frequency is increased compared to purely hadronic models. We thus conclude that also hybrid star mergers with an onset of the hadron-quark phase transition at relatively low densities may lead to the very same characteristic signature of quark deconfinement in the postmerger GW signal as systems undergoing the phase transition during merging.
A kilonova signal is generally expected after a Black Hole - Neutron Star merger. The strength of the signal is related to the equation of state of neutron star matter and it increases with the stiffness of the latter. The recent results obtained by NICER suggest a rather stiff equation of state and the expected kilonova signal is therefore strong, at least if the mass of the Black Hole does not exceed $sim 10 M_odot$. We compare the predictions obtained by considering equations of state of neutron star matter satisfying the most recent observations and assuming that only one family of compact stars exists with the results predicted in the two-families scenario. In the latter a soft hadronic equation of state produces very compact stellar objects while a rather stiff quark matter equation of state produces massive strange quark stars, satisfying NICER results. The expected kilonova signal in the two-families scenario is very weak: the Strange Quark Star - Black Hole merger does not produce a kilonova signal because, according to simulations, the amount of mass ejected is negligible and the Hadronic Star - Black Hole merger produces a much weaker signal than in the one-family scenario because the hadronic equation of state is very soft. This prediction will be easily tested with the new generation of detectors.
The observations of compact star inspirals from LIGO/Virgo provide a valuable tool to study the highly uncertain equation of state (EOS) of dense matter at the densities in which the compact stars reside. It is not clear whether the merging stars are neutron stars or quark stars containing self-bound quark matter. In this work, we explore the allowed bag-model-like EOSs by assuming the merging stars are strange quark stars (SQSs) from a Bayesian analysis employing the tidal deformability observational data of the GW170817 and GW190425 binary mergers. We consider two extreme states of strange quark matter, either in nonsuperfluid or color-flavor locked (CFL) and find the results in these two cases essentially reconcile. In particular, our results indicate that the sound speed in the SQS matter is approximately a constant close to the conformal limit of $c/sqrt{3}$. The universal relations between the mass, the tidal deformability and the compactness are provided for the SQSs. The most probable values of the maximum mass are found to be $M_{rm TOV}=2.10_{-0.12}^{+0.12}~(2.15_{-0.14}^{+0.16}),M_{odot}$ for normal (CFL) SQSs at a $90%$ confidence level. The corresponding radius and tidal deformability for a $1.4,M_{odot}$ star are $R_{rm 1.4}= 11.50_{-0.55}^{+0.52}~({11.42}_{-0.44}^{+0.52})~rm km$ and $Lambda_{1.4}= {650}_{-190}^{+230}~({630}_{-150}^{+220})$, respectively. We also investigate the possibility of GW190814s secondary component $m_2$ of mass $2.59_{-0.09}^{+0.08},M_{odot}$ being an SQS, and find that it could be a CFL SQS with the pairing gap $Delta$ larger than $244~rm MeV$ and the effective bag parameter $B_{rm eff}^{1/4}$ in the range of $170$ to $192$ MeV, at a $90%$ confidence level.