Related papers: How rapidly do neutron stars spin at birth?
The prescient remark by Baade and Zwicky that supernovae beget neutron stars did little to prepare us for the remarkable variety of observational manifestations such objects display. Indeed, during the first thirty years of the empirical…
We explore the effect of pulsars, in particular those born with millisecond periods, on their surrounding supernova ejectas. While they spin down, fast-spinning pulsars release their tremendous rotational energy in the form of a…
The spin evolution of isolated neutron stars (NSs) is dominatd by their magnetic fields. The measured braking indices of young NSs show that the spin-down mechanism due to magnetic dipole radiation with constant magnetic fields is…
An important recent discovery by Pfahl et al. (2002) is that there are two classes of Be X-ray binaries: one with orbits of small eccentricity (<0.25), in which the neutron stars received hardly any kick velocity at birth and a class with…
Fast spinning neutron stars, recycled in low mass binaries, may have accreted a substantial amount of mass. The available relativistic measurements of neutron star masses, all clustering around 1.4 M_sun, however refer mostly to slowly…
We find evidence for a faint wind nebula surrounding PSR J0538+2817 in CXO-ACIS imaging. This object is particularly interesting, as the pulsar spindown age is largest for any such X-ray PWN. If interpreted as an equatorial torus, the PWN…
Evidence from pulsar wind nebula symmetry axes and radio polarization observations suggests that pulsar motions correlate with the spin directions. We assemble this evidence for young isolated pulsars and show how it can be used to…
In the core of a canonical spinning magnetized neutron star(NS) a nearly uniform superfluid neutron vortex-array interacts strongly with a twisted array of magnetic flux-tubes threading the core's superconducting protons. One consequence is…
Soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous x-ray pulsars (AXPs) are young (<100 kyr), radio-quiet, x-ray pulsars which have been rapidly spun-down to slow spin periods clustered at 5-12 s. Nearly all of these unusual pulsars also appear…
Because supernova remnants are short lived, studies of neutron star X-ray binaries within supernova remnants probe the earliest stages in the life of accreting neutron stars. However, such objects are exceedingly rare: none were known to…
We present a statistical analysis of the X-ray luminosity of rotation powered pulsars and their surrounding nebulae using the sample of Kargaltsev & Pavlov (2008) and we complement this with an analysis of the gamma-ray-emission of Fermi…
It is generally accepted that neutron stars form in core collapse events that are accompanied by a supernovae (types II or Ib or Ic). Typical progenitors are, therefore, larger than $\sim 2.1 \Ms$. We suggest \cite{PS04,PS05} that the…
Fallback discs around neutron stars (NSs) are believed to be an expected outcome of supernova explosions. Here we investigate the consequences of such a common outcome for the timing and spectral properties of the associated NS population,…
Strong magnetic field of accreting neutron stars ($10^{14}$ G) is hard to probe by X-ray spectroscopy but can be indirectly inferred from spin-up/spin-down measurement in X-ray pulsars. The existing observations of slowly rotating X-ray…
Young isolated radio-quiet neutron stars are still hot enough to be detectable at X-ray and optical wavelengths due to their thermal emission and can hence probe cooling curves. An identification of their birth sites can constrain their…
After Michel (1994) introduced a phenomenological picture of `rapid magnetization' of newly born neutron stars (NSs), Muslimov & Page (1995) suggested that the physical conditions accompanying the formation of a NS may result in the surface…
There is a remarkable correlation between the spin periods of the accreting neutron stars in Be/X-ray binaries (BeXBs) and their orbital periods . Recently Knigge et al. (2011) showed that the distribution of the spin periods contains two…
We report on the long-term average spin period, rate of change of spin period and X-ray luminosity during outbursts for 42 Be X-ray binary systems in the Small Magellanic Cloud. We also collect and calculate parameters of each system and…
Core-collapse supernovae (SNe) expand into a medium created by winds from the pre-SN progenitor. The SN explosion and resulting shock wave(s) heat up the surrounding plasma, giving rise to thermal X-ray emission, which depends on the…
Observations made using the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have shown that accreting weak-field neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binary systems (LMXBs) produce three distinct types of millisecond X-ray oscillations that can be used to determine…