Modeling atmosphere emission from magnetic neutron stars

Since their discovery, neutron stars have been recognized to be unique natural laboratories for helping our understanding of fundamental physics, including nuclear and particle physics and the theory of gravity. The excellent sensitivity of the new X-ray telescopes, e.g., Chandra and XMM-Newton, is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advances in space research 2007, Vol.40 (10), p.1432-1440
Main Authors: Ho, Wynn C.G., Chang, Philip, Kaplan, David L., Mori, Kaya, Potekhin, Alexander Y., van Adelsberg, Matthew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Magnetic fields
Radiative transfer
Stars: Atmospheres
Stars: Magnetic fields
Stars: Neutron
X-rays: Stars
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Summary:Since their discovery, neutron stars have been recognized to be unique natural laboratories for helping our understanding of fundamental physics, including nuclear and particle physics and the theory of gravity. The excellent sensitivity of the new X-ray telescopes, e.g., Chandra and XMM-Newton, is ideal for the study of cooling, isolated neutron stars, which emit at these energies. In order to exploit the wealth of information contained in the data, a thorough knowledge of the emission properties of neutron stars is necessary. We describe our work on constructing atmosphere models, which determine the observed spectra from neutron stars. In particular, we discuss the effects of vacuum polarization and bound atoms on the atmosphere structure and spectra. We show that our partially ionized hydrogen atmosphere model spectra can fit the multi-wavelength spectrum of the neutron star RX J1856.5–3754. On the other hand, mid- Z element atmospheres may fit other isolated neutron stars, such as 1E 1207.4–5209.
ISSN:0273-1177
1879-1948
DOI:10.1016/j.asr.2007.04.011