English

Gravitational Waves and the Maximum Spin Frequency of Neutron Stars

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-05-30 v1

Abstract

In this Letter we re-examine the idea that gravitational waves are required as a braking mechanism to explain the observed maximum spin-frequency of neutron stars. We show that for millisecond X-ray pulsars, the existence of spin equilibrium as set by the disk/magnetosphere interaction is sufficient to explain the observations. We show as well that no clear correlation exists between the neutron star magnetic field B and the X-ray outburst luminosity Lx when considering an enlarged sample size of millisecond X-ray pulsars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.0536,
  title  = {Gravitational Waves and the Maximum Spin Frequency of Neutron Stars},
  author = {Alessandro Patruno and Brynmor Haskell and Caroline D'Angelo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.0536},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures, Submitted to ApJ Letters