Related papers: Low-Energy X-ray Emission from Young Isolated Neut…
X-ray emission is a common feature of all varieties of isolated neutron stars (INS) and, thanks to the advent of sensitive instruments with good spectroscopic, timing, and imaging capabilities, X-ray observations have become an essential…
Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, that radiate at the expense of their strong magnetic field and their high surface temperature. Five decades of multi-wavelength observations showed a large variety of physical parameters, such as…
Young stars show a variety of highly energetic phenomena, from accretion and outflow processes to hot coronal plasmas confined in their outer atmosphere, all regulated by the intense stellar magnetic fields. Many aspects on each of these…
We consider the result of acceleration of heavy ions in the slot gap potential of a very young pulsar with a hot polar cap. Photodisintegration of the heavy ions in the radiation field of the polar cap and pulsar surface gives rise to a…
Using recently calculated analytic models for the thermal structure of ultramagnetized neutron stars, we estimate the thermal fluxes from young ($t\sim 1000$ yr) ultramagnetized ($B \sim 10^{15}$ G) cooling neutron stars. We find that the…
Surface thermal emission has been detected by ROSAT from four nearby young neutron stars. Assuming black body emission, the significant pulsations of the observed light curves can be interpreted as due to large surface temperature…
A model is proposed for the observed combination of power-law and thermal emission of keV X-rays from rotationally powered pulsars. For gamma-ray pulsars with accelerators very many stellar radii above the neutron star surface, 100 MeV…
We study several effects that influence the strength of the proton cyclotron and atomic features in the thermal spectra of magnetic neutron stars. We show that it is possible for vacuum polarization to strongly suppress the spectral lines…
The observational properties of Soft Gamma Repeaters and Ano\-malous X-ray Pulsars (SGR/AXP) indicate to necessity of the energy source different from a rotational energy of a neutron star. The model, where the source of the energy is…
This is a review of X-ray emission from all types of isolated neutron stars, with an emphasis on rotation-powered pulsars. Topics include magnetospheric and thermal emission, as well as pulsar wind nebulae.
Since the opacity of a magnetized plasma depends on polarization of radiation, the radiation emergent from atmospheres of neutron stars with strong magnetic fields is expected to be strongly polarized. The degree of linear polarization,…
We explore a possibility to explain the phenomenon of the Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXP) and Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGR) within the scenario of fall-back magnetic accretion onto a young isolated neutron star. The X-ray emission of the…
Observations of cooling neutron stars allow to measure photospheric radii and to constrain the equation of state of nuclear matter at high densities. In this paper we concentrate on neutron stars, which show thermal (photospheric) X-ray…
The magnetic fields of neutron stars have a large range (~3e10 - 1e15 G). There may be a tendency for more highly magnetized neutron stars to come from more massive stellar progenitors, but other factors must also play a role. When combined…
I summarize some constraints on the physics of neutron stars arising from X-ray observations of the surfaces of neutron stars, focusing on using models of low-magnetic-field neutron star atmospheres to interpret their X-ray spectra. I…
The cooling theory of neutron stars is corroborated by its comparison with observations of thermally emitting isolated neutron stars and accreting neutron stars in binary systems. An important ingredient for such an analysis is the age of…
Estimates indicate there may be $\simgreat 10^3$ low luminosity X-ray pulsars ($L \simless 10^{34} \rom{erg\;s^{-1}}$) in the Galaxy undergoing ``low-state'' wind accretion in Be/X-ray binary systems, and $\sim 10^8-10^9$ isolated neutron…
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…
In the atmospheric plasma of a strongly magnetized neutron star, vacuum polarization can induce a Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein like resonance across which a X-ray photon may (depending on its energy) convert from one mode into the other,…
The largest number of known young neutron stars are observed as spin-powered pulsars. While the majority of those are detected at radio frequencies, an increasing number can be studied at other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as well.…