Thermal emission from Isolated Neutron Stars and their surface magnetic field: going quadrupolar?
Abstract
In the last few years considerable observational resources have been devoted to study the thermal emission from isolated neutron stars. Detailed XMM and Chandra observations revealed a number of features in the X-ray pulse profile, like asymmetry, energy dependence, and possible evolution of the pulse profile over a time scale of months or years. Here we show that these characteristics may be explained by a patchy surface temperature distribution, which is expected if the magnetic field has a complex structure in which higher order multipoles contribute together with the dipole. We reconsider these effects from a theoretical point of view, and discuss their implications to the observational properties of thermally emitting neutron stars.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0501094,
title = {Thermal emission from Isolated Neutron Stars and their surface magnetic field: going quadrupolar?},
author = {Silvia Zane and Roberto Turolla},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0501094},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
6 pages, 1 TeX file, 6 postscript figures; macro: elsart.cls. Accepted for publication in Advances in Space Research. Manuscript Number: JASR-D-04-00405R1