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Register a new userModel Atmospheres for X-ray Bursting Neutron Stars
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The hydrogen and helium accreted by X-ray bursting neutron stars is periodically consumed in runaway thermonuclear reactions that cause the entire surface to glow brightly in X-rays for a few seconds. With models of the emission, the mass and radius of the neutron star can be inferred from the observations. By simultaneously probing neutron star masses and radii, X-ray bursts are one of the strongest diagnostics of the nature of matter at extremely high densities. Accurate determinations of these parameters are difficult, however, due to the highly non-ideal nature of the atmospheres where X-ray bursts occur. Observations from X-ray telescopes such as RXTE and NuStar can potentially place strong constraints on nuclear matter once uncertainties in atmosphere models have been reduced. Here we discuss current progress on modeling atmospheres of X-ray bursting neutron stars and some of the challenges still to be overcome.
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Some thermonuclear (type I) X-ray bursts at the neutron star surfaces in low-mass X-ray binaries take place during hard persistent states of the systems. Spectral evolution of these bursts is well described by the atmosphere model of a passively cooling neutron star when the burst luminosity is high enough. The observed spectral evolution deviates from the model predictions when the burst luminosity drops below a critical value of 20-70% of the maximum luminosity. We suggest that these deviations are induced by the additional heating of the accreted particles. We present a method for computation of the neutron star atmosphere models heated by accreted particles assuming that their energy is released via Coulomb interactions with electrons. We compute the temperature structures and the emergent spectra of the atmospheres of various chemical compositions and investigate the dependence of the results on the other model parameters. We show that the heated atmosphere develops the hot (20--100 keV) corona-like surface layer cooled by Compton scattering, and the deeper, almost isothermal optically thick region with a temperature of a few keV. The emergent spectra deviate strongly from those of undisturbed neutron star atmospheres, with the main differences being the presence of a high-energy tail and a strong excess in the low-energy part of the spectrum. They also lack the iron absorption edge, which is visible in the spectra of undisturbed low-luminosity atmospheres with solar chemical composition. Using the computed spectra, we obtained the dependences of the dilution and color-correction factors as functions of relative luminosities for pure helium and solar abundance atmospheres. We show that the helium model atmosphere heated by accretion corresponding to 5% of the Eddington luminosity describes well the late stages of the X-ray bursts in 4U 1820-30.
We construct partially ionized hydrogen atmosphere models for magnetized neutron stars in radiative equilibrium with fixed surface fields between B=10^12 and 2x10^13 G and effective temperatures logT_eff=5.5-6.8, as well as with surface B and T_eff distributions around these values. The models are based on the latest equation of state and opacity results for magnetized, partially ionized hydrogen plasmas. The atmospheres directly determine the characteristics of thermal emission from the surface of neutron stars. We also incorporate these model spectra into XSPEC, under the model name NSMAX, thus allowing them to be used by the community to fit X-ray observations of neutron stars.
The discovery of photospheric absorption lines in XMM-Newton spectra of the X-ray bursting neutron star in EXO0748-676 by Cottam and collaborators allows us to constrain the neutron star mass-radius ratio from the measured gravitational redshift. A radius of R=9-12km for a plausible mass range of M=1.4-1.8Msun was derived by these authors. It has been claimed that the absorption features stem from gravitationally redshifted (z=0.35) n=2-3 lines of H- and He-like iron. We investigate this identification and search for alternatives. We compute LTE and non-LTE neutron-star model atmospheres and detailed synthetic spectra for a wide range of effective temperatures (effective temperatures of 1 - 20MK) and different chemical compositions. We are unable to confirm the identification of the absorption features in the X-ray spectrum of EXO0748-676 as n=2-3 lines of H- and He-like iron (Fe XXVI and Fe XXV). These are subordinate lines that are predicted by our models to be too weak at any effective temperature. It is more likely that the strongest feature is from the n=2-3 resonance transition in Fe XXIV with a redshift of z=0.24. Adopting this value yields a larger neutron star radius, namely R=12-15km for the mass range M=1.4-1.8Msun, favoring a stiff equation-of-state and excluding mass-radius relations based on exotic matter. Combined with an estimate of the stellar radius R>12.5km from the work of Oezel and collaborators, the z=0.24 value provides a minimum neutron-star mass of M>1.48Msun, instead of M>1.9Msun, when assuming z=0.35.
The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) presents an exciting new capability for exploring the modulation properties of X-ray emitting neutron stars, including large area, low background, extremely precise absolute event time stamps, superb low-energy response and flexible scheduling. The Pulsation Searches and Multiwavelength Coordination working group has designed a 2.5 Ms observing program to search for emission and characterize the modulation properties of about 30 known or suspected neutron star sources across a number of source categories. A key early goal will be to search for pulsations from millisecond pulsars that might exhibit thermal pulsations from the surface suitable for pulse profile modeling to constrain the neutron star equation of state. In addition, we will search for pulsations from transitional millisecond pulsars, isolated neutron stars, low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), accretion-powered millisecond pulsars, central compact objects and other sources. We present our science plan and initial results from the first months of the NICER mission, including the discovery of pulsations from the millisecond pulsar J1231-1411.
The ultracompact low-mass X-ray binary 4U 1820-30 situated in the globular cluster NGC 6624 has an orbital period of only $approx$11.4 min which likely implies a white dwarf companion. The observed X-ray bursts demonstrate a photospheric radius expansion phase and therefore are believed to reach the Eddington luminosity allowing us to estimate the mass and the radius of the neutron star (NS) in this binary. Here we re-analyse all Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer observations of the system and confirm that almost all the bursts took place during the hard persistent state of the system. This allows us to use the recently developed direct cooling tail method to estimate the NS mass and radius. However, because of the very short, about a second, duration of the cooling tail phases that can be described by the theoretical atmosphere models, the obtained constraints on the NS radius are not very strict. Assuming a pure helium NS atmosphere we found that the NS radius is in the range 10-12 km, if the NS mass is below 1.7 $M_odot$, and in a wider range of 8-12 km for a higher 1.7-2.0 $M_odot$ NS mass. The method also constrains the distance to the system to be 6.5$pm$0.5 kpc, which is consistent with the distance to the cluster. For the solar composition atmosphere, the NS parameters are in strong contradiction with the generally accepted range of possible NS masses and radii.
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