Thermal luminosities of cooling neutron stars
Abstract
Ages and thermal luminosities of neutron stars, inferred from observations, can be interpreted with the aid of the neutron star cooling theory to gain information on the properties of superdense matter in neutron-star interiors. We present a survey of estimated ages, surface temperatures and thermal luminosities of middle-aged neutron stars with relatively weak or moderately strong magnetic fields, which can be useful for these purposes. The catalogue includes results selected from the literature, supplemented with new results of spectral analysis of a few cooling neutron stars. The data are compared with the theory. We show that overall agreement of theoretical cooling curves with observations improves substantially for models where neutron superfluidity in stellar core is weak.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.15004,
title = {Thermal luminosities of cooling neutron stars},
author = {A. Y. Potekhin and D. A. Zyuzin and D. G. Yakovlev and M. V. Beznogov and Yu. A. Shibanov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.15004},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
23 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted by MNRAS. In v.2, acknowledgements are supplemented