Neutron star cooling: theoretical aspects and observational constraints
نویسندگان
چکیده
The cooling theory of isolated neutron stars is reviewed. The main cooling regulators are discussed, first of all, operation of direct Urca process (or similar processes in exotic phases of dense matter) and superfluidity in stellar interiors. The prospects to constrain gross parameters of supranuclear matter in neutron star interiors by confronting cooling theory with observations of isolated neutron stars are outlined. A related problem of thermal states of transiently accreting neutron stars with deep crustal heating of accreted matter is discussed in application to soft X-ray transients. 2003 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
منابع مشابه
Improbability of DUrca process constraints EOS
According to recent observational and theoretical progresses, the DUrca process (direct Urca process) may be excluded from the category of neutron star cooling mechanisms. This result combined with the latest nuclear symmetry energy experiments, will provide us an independent way of testing the EOS (equation of state) for supernuclear density. For example, soft EOSs such as FPS will probably be...
متن کاملRecent Developments in Neutron Star Thermal Evolution Theories and Observation(*)
Recent years have seen some significant progress in theoretical studies of physics of dense matter. Combined with the observational data now available from the successful launch of Chandra and XMM/Newton X-ray space missions as well as various lower-energy band observations, these developments now offer the hope for distinguishing various competing neutron star thermal evolution models. For ins...
متن کاملCooling of Neutron Stars with Color Superconducting Quark Cores
We show that within a recently developed nonlocal chiral quark model the critical density for a phase transition to color superconducting quark matter under neutron star conditions can be low enough for these phases to occur in compact star configurations with masses below 1.3 M⊙. We study the cooling of these objects in isolation for different values of the gravitational mass and argue that, i...
متن کاملThermal Radiation from Cooling Neutron Stars
Observations of thermal radiation from neutron stars allow one to measure the surface temperatures and confront them with cooling scenarios. Detection of gravitationally redshifted spectral lines can yield the mass-to-radius ratio. In the few cases when the distance is known, one can measure the neutron star radius, which is particularly important to constrain the equation of state of the super...
متن کاملGeminga: A Cooling Superfluid Neutron Star
We compare the recent temperature estimate for Geminga with neutron star cooling models. Because of its age (∼ 3.4 × 10 yr), Geminga is in the photon cooling era. We show that its surface temperature (∼ 5.2× 10 K) can be understood by both types of neutrino cooling scenarios, i.e, slow neutrino cooling by the modified Urca process or fast neutrino cooling by the direct Urca process or by some e...
متن کامل