English

Evolving neutron star+helium star systems to intermediate-mass binary pulsars

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-09-17 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Intermediate-mass binary pulsars (IMBPs) are composed of neutron stars (NSs) and CO/ONe white dwarfs (WDs). It is generally suggested that IMBPs evolve from intermediate-mass X-ray binaries (IMXBs). However, this scenario is difficult to explain the formation of IMBPs with orbital periods (PorbP_{\rm orb}) less than 3 d. It has recently been proposed that a system consisting of a neutron star (NS) and a helium (He) star can form IMBPs with PorbP_{\rm orb} less than 3 d (known as the NS+He star scenario), but previous works can only cover a few observed sources with short orbital periods. We aim to investigate the NS+He star scenario by adopting different descriptions of the Eddington accretion rate (M˙Edd\dot M_{\rm Edd}) for NSs and different NS masses (MNSM_{\rm NS}) varying from 1.10M1.10\,\rm M_{\odot} to 1.80M1.80\,\rm M_{\odot}. Our results can cover most of the observed IMBPs with short orbital periods and almost half of the observed IMBPs with long orbital periods. We found that M˙Edd\dot{M}_{\rm Edd}\proptoMNSM_{\rm NS}1/3^{\rm -1/3} could match the observations better than a specific value for all NSs. We also found that the final spin periods of NSs slightly decrease with the initial MNSM_{\rm NS}. The observed parameters of PSR J0621+1002, which is one of the well-observed IMBPs whose pulsar mass has been precisely measured, can be reproduced by the present work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.07132,
  title  = {Evolving neutron star+helium star systems to intermediate-mass binary pulsars},
  author = {Tang Wenshi and Liu Dongdong and Wang Bo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.07132},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:16:31.546Z