Magnetars: fact or fiction?
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
2015-05-30 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Abstract
Anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) and soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) are enigmatic pulsar-like objects. The energy budget is the fundamental problem in their studies. In the magnetar model, they are supposed to be powered by the extremely strong magnetic fields (>~ 10^14 G) of neutron stars. Observations for and against the magnetar model are both summarized. Considering the difficulties encountered by the magnetar model to comfortably understand more and more observations, one may doubt that AXPs and SGRs are really magnetars. If they are not magnetar candidates (including magnetar-based models), then they must be "quark star/fallback disk" systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1110.1975,
title = {Magnetars: fact or fiction?},
author = {H. Tong and R. X. Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.1975},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 1 figure; talk at SMFN2011