Accreting neutron stars
Manuel Linares
Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Accretion onto neutron stars powers the brightest X-ray sources in
the sky, offering a unique opportunity to test strong gravity and ultra
dense matter. The luminosity and energy spectrum of neutron star low-mass
X-ray binaries vary in a wide range of timescales. On the short timescale
side (seconds to milliseconds), I will show and discuss results on the
rapid X-ray variability of two accreting millisecond pulsars: kilohertz
quasi-periodic oscillations in XTE J1807-294 and extremely strong broadband
noise in IGR J00291+5934. On much longer timescales (hours to weeks) these
systems switch between different accretion states, which reflect different
configurations of the accretion flow. I will present a systematic study
of the luminosity, spectral and variability properties of such accretion
states and discuss the main results of this work: i) the luminosity
of state transitions varies by more than one order of magnitude among
different systems and ii) some of the variability frequencies show a
universal anti correlation with the hardness of the energy spectrum.
Date: | Monday, 26 January 2009 |
Time: | 15:30 |
Where: | McGill University |
| Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, R.E. Bell Conference Room (room 103) |
|