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Register a new userIs PSR B0943+10 a low-mass quark star?
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A recent X-ray observation has shown that the radio pulsar PSR B0943+10, with clear drifting subpulses, has a much smaller polar cap area than that of conventional pulsars with mass of $simmsun$ and radius of $sim10$ km. Zhang et al. (2005) addressed then that this new result conflicts with the standard vacuum gap model. Nonetheless, the discrepancy could be explained if PSR B0943+10 is actually a low-mass quark star. It is found that the potential drop in the open-field-line region of oblique pulsars (i.e., inclination angle $alpha eq 0$) might be $sim 10^2$ times that of aligned pulsars, and that PSR B0943+10 with $alpha = 12.4^{rm o}$ could be well above the deathline. We thus conclude that the Ruderman-Sutherland-type vacuum gap model still works well for this pulsar if it is a bare quark star with a mass of $sim 0.02M_odot$ and a radius of $sim 2.6$ km.
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New simultaneous X-ray and radio observations of the archetypal mode-switching pulsar PSR B0943+10 have been carried out with XMM-Newton and the LOFAR, LWA and Arecibo radio telescopes in November 2014. They allowed us to better constrain the X-ray spectral and variability properties of this pulsar and to detect, for the first time, the X-ray pulsations also during the X-ray-fainter mode. The combined timing and spectral analysis indicates that unpulsed non-thermal emission, likely of magnetospheric origin, and pulsed thermal emission from a small polar cap are present during both radio modes and vary in a correlated way.
Observations obtained in the last years challenged the widespread notion that rotation-powered neutron stars are steady X-ray emitters. Besides a few allegedly rotation-powered neutron stars that showed magnetar-like variability, a particularly interesting case is that of PSR B0943+10. Recent observations have shown that this pulsar, well studied in the radio band where it alternates between a bright and a quiescent mode, displays significant X-ray variations, anticorrelated in flux with the radio emission. The study of such synchronous radio/X-ray mode switching opens a new window to investigate the processes responsible for the pulsar radio and high-energy emission. Here we review the main X-ray properties of PSR B0943+10 derived from recent coordinated X-ray and radio observations.
In this paper, we analyze time series measurements of PSR B0943+10 and fit them with a non-radial oscillation model. The model we apply was first developed for total intensity measurements in an earlier paper, and expanded to encompass linear polarization in a companion paper to this one. We use PSR B0943+10 for the initial tests of our model because it has a simple geometry, it has been exhaustively studied in the literature, and its behavior is well-documented. As prelude to quantitative fitting, we have reanalyzed previously published archival data of PSR B0943+10 and uncovered subtle but significant behavior that is difficult to explain in the framework of the drifting spark model. Our fits of a non-radial oscillation model are able to successfully reproduce the observed behavior in this pulsar.
Recent work by Rankin & Deshpande strongly suggests that there exist strong ``micro-storms rotating around the magnetic axis of the 1.1s pulsar PSR 0943+10. Such a feature hints that most probably the large-voltage vacuum gap proposed by Ruderman & Sutherland (RS) does exist in the pulsar polar cap. However, there are severe arguments against the formation of the RS-type gap in pulsars, since the binding energies of both the Fe ions and the electrons in a neutron stars surface layer is too small to prevent thermionic ejection of the particles from the surface. Here we propose that PSR 0943+10 (probably also most of the other ``drifting pulsars) might be bare strange stars rather than normal neutron stars, in which the ``binding energy at the surface is merely infinity either for the case of ``pulsar or ``anti-pulsar. It is further proposed that identifying a drifting pulsar as an anti-pulsar is the key criterion to distinguish strange stars from neutron stars.
We report on simultaneous X-ray and radio observations of the mode-switching pulsar PSR B0943+10 obtained with the XMM-Newton satellite and the LOFAR, LWA and Arecibo radio telescopes in November 2014. We confirm the synchronous X-ray/radio switching between a radio-bright (B) and a radio-quiet (Q) mode, in which the X-ray flux is a factor ~2.4 higher than in the B-mode. We discovered X-ray pulsations, with pulsed fraction of 38+/-5% (0.5-2 keV), during the B-mode, and confirm their presence in Q-mode, where the pulsed fraction increases with energy from ~20% up to ~65% at 2 keV. We found marginal evidence for an increase in the X-ray pulsed fraction during B-mode on a timescale of hours. The Q-mode X-ray spectrum requires a fit with a two-component model (either a power-law plus blackbody or the sum of two blackbodies), while the B-mode spectrum is well fit by a single blackbody (a single power-law is rejected). With a maximum likelihood analysis, we found that in Q-mode the pulsed emission has a thermal blackbody spectrum with temperature ~3.4x10^6 K and the unpulsed emission is a power-law with photon index ~2.5, while during B-mode both the pulsed and unpulsed emission can be fit by either a blackbody or a power law with similar values of temperature and photon index. A Chandra image shows no evidence for diffuse X-ray emission. These results support a scenario in which both unpulsed non-thermal emission, likely of magnetospheric origin, and pulsed thermal emission from a small polar cap (~1500 m^2) with a strong non-dipolar magnetic field (~10^{14} G), are present during both radio modes and vary in intensity in a correlated way. This is broadly consistent with the predictions of the partially screened gap model and does not necessarily imply global magnetospheric rearrangements to explain the mode switching.
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