Related papers: Burning in the tail: implications for a burst osci…
Strongly magnetized, accreting neutron stars show periodic and aperiodic variability over a wide range of time scales. By obtaining spectral and timing information on these different time scales, we can have a closer look into the physics…
Gravitational radiation (GR) drives an instability in certain modes of rotating stars. This instability is strong enough in the case of the r-modes to cause their amplitudes to grow on a timescale of tens of seconds in rapidly rotating…
Differential rotation induced by the r-mode instability can generate very strong toroidal fields in the core of accreting, millisecond spinning neutron stars. We introduce explicitly the magnetic damping term in the evolution equations of…
Gravitational, magnetic and superfluid forces can stress the crust of an evolving neutron star. Fracture of the crust under these stresses could affect the star's spin evolution and generate high-energy emission. We study the growth of…
A phase transition occurring in the inner core of a neutron star could be associated to a density discontinuity that would affect the frequency spectrum of the non-radial oscillation modes in two ways. Firstly, it would produce a softening…
We describe sophisticated new Bayesian analysis methods that make it possible to estimate quickly the masses and radii of rapidly rotating, oblate neutron stars by fitting oblate-star waveform models to energy-resolved observations of the…
SAX J1810.8-2609 is a faint X-ray transient, mostly known for its abnormally low quiescent thermal luminosity, which disagrees with standard cooling models. It is also one of a small sample of stars whose mass and radius have been estimated…
Transiently accreting neutron stars in quiescence (Lx<10^34 erg/s) have been observed to vary in intensity by factors of few, over timescales of days to years. If the quiescent luminosity is powered by a hot NS core, the core cooling…
A model for stationary, radiatively driven winds from X--ray bursting neutron stars is presented. General relativistic hydrodynamical and radiative transfer equations are integrated from the neutron star surface outwards, taking into…
We present the first vertically resolved hydrodynamic simulations of a laterally propagating, deflagrating flame in the thin helium ocean of a rotating accreting neutron star. We use a new hydrodynamics solver tailored to deal with the…
The presence of a viscous boundary layer under the solid crust of a neutron star dramatically increases the viscous damping rate of the fluid r-modes. We improve previous estimates of this damping rate by including the effect of the…
Neutron stars in mass-transferring binaries are accreting the hydrogen and helium rich matter from the surfaces of their companions. This article simply explains the physics associated with how that material eventually fuses to form heavier…
We investigate the latitude at which type I X-ray bursts are ignited on rapidly rotating accreting neutron stars. We find that, for a wide range of accretion rates, ignition occurs preferentially at the equator, in accord with the work of…
The dramatic discovery with the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite of remarkably coherent $\sim$300--1200 Hz oscillations in the X-ray brightness of some sixteen neutron stars in low-mass binary systems has spurred theoretical modeling…
We present a model of a viscously evolving accretion disc around a magnetized neutron star. The model features the varying outer radius of the hot ionized part of the disc due to cooling and the varying inner radius of the disc due to…
We report the discovery with the proportional counter array (PCA) onboard the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) of a decrease in the frequency of X-ray brightness oscillations in the cooling tail of an X-ray burst from 4U 1636-53. This is…
This paper presents an estimate for the spectral properties of the stochastic background of gravitational waves emitted by a population of hot, young, rapidly rotating neutron stars throughout the Universe undergoing $f$-mode instabilities,…
Neutron stars, with their strong surface gravity, have interestingly short timescales for the sedimentation of heavy elements. Recent observations of unstable thermonuclear burning (observed as X-ray bursts) on the surfaces of slowly…
We consider the astrophysical constraints on the gravitational-wave driven r-mode instability in accreting neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries. We use recent results on superfluid and superconducting properties to infer the core…
We study the dynamical evolution of a large amplitude r-mode by numerical simulations. R-modes in neutron stars are unstable growing modes, driven by gravitational radiation reaction. In these simulations, r-modes of amplitude unity or…