In a cool neutron star (T . 10 K) endowed with a rather high magnetic field (B & 10 G), a phase transition may occur in the outermost layers. As a consequence the neutron star becomes “bare”, i.e. no gaseous atmosphere sits on the top of the crust. The surface of a cooling, bare neutron star does not necessarily emit a blackbody spectrum because the emissivity is strongly suppressed at energies...

We present spectroscopy and Hα imaging of a faint nebula surrounding the X-ray bright, nearby neutron star RX J1856.5−3754. The nebula shows no strong lines other than the Hydrogen Balmer lines and has a cometary-like morphology, with the apex being approximately 1′′ ahead of the neutron star, and the tail extending up to at least 25′′ behind it. We find that the current observations can be sat...

Recent Chandra observations have convincingly shown that the soft X-ray emission from the isolated neutron star candidate RX J1856.5-3754 is best represented by a featureless blackbody spectrum, in apparent contrast with the predictions of current neutron star atmospheric models. Moreover, the recently measured star distance (≈ 120−140 pc) implies a radiation radius of at most ∼ 5−6 km, too sma...

An unusual X-ray source, RX J1856.5-3754, has recently been discovered with ROSAT: its spectrum resembles that of supersoft sources, but the very high X-ray to optical flux ratio excludes the presence of a companion star, pointing to an isolated compact object. It has been proposed that RX J1856.53754 is an old, isolated neutron star accreting from the interstellar medium. Here we present a rea...

Title: Aggregation-triggering segments of SOD1 fibril formation support a common pathway for familial and sporadic ALS Authors: Magdalena I Ivanova, Stuart A Sievers, Elizabeth L. Guenther, Lisa M. Johnson, Duane D. Winkler, Ahmad Galaleldeen, Michael R Sawaya, P. John Hart, David Eisenberg Corresponding author: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics, De...