NICER X-Ray Observations of Seven Nearby Rotation-powered Millisecond Pulsars
Name
Guillot_2019_ApJL_887_L27.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.76 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Guillot, Sebastien
Kerr, Matthew
Ray, Paul S
Bogdanov, Slavko
Ransom, Scott
Deneva, Julia S
Arzoumanian, Zaven
Bult, Peter
Chakrabarty, Deepto
Gendreau, Keith C
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.. The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer observed several rotation-powered millisecond pulsars (MSPs) to search for or confirm the presence of X-ray pulsations. When broad and sine-like, these pulsations may indicate thermal emission from hot polar caps at the magnetic poles on the neutron star surface. We report confident detections (≥4.7σ after background filtering) of X-ray pulsations for five of the seven pulsars in our target sample: PSR J0614-3329, PSR J0636+5129, PSR J0751+1807, PSR J1012+5307, and PSR J2241-5236, while PSR J1552+5437 and PSR J1744-1134 remain undetected. Of those, only PSR J0751+1807 and PSR J1012+5307 had pulsations previously detected at the 1.7σ and almost 3σ confidence levels, respectively, in XMM-Newton data. All detected sources exhibit broad sine-like pulses, which are indicative of surface thermal radiation. As such, these MSPs are promising targets for future X-ray observations aimed at constraining the neutron star mass-radius relation and the dense matter equation of state using detailed pulse profile modeling. Furthermore, we find that three of the detected MSPs exhibit a significant phase offset between their X-ray and radio pulses.
MIT Department
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/AB511B
