English

Rotation-induced deep crustal heating of millisecond pulsars

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-08-19 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Nuclear Theory

Abstract

The spin-down of a neutron star, e.g. due to magneto-dipole losses, results in compression of the stellar matter and induces nuclear reactions at phase transitions between different nuclear species in the crust. We show that this mechanism is effective in heating recycled pulsars, in which the previous accretion process has already been compressing the crust, so it is not in nuclear equilibrium. We calculate the corresponding emissivity and confront it with available observations, showing that it might account for the likely thermal ultraviolet emission of PSR J0437-4715.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.04586,
  title  = {Rotation-induced deep crustal heating of millisecond pulsars},
  author = {M. E. Gusakov and E. M. Kantor and A. Reisenegger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.04586},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters