Ultraluminous X-ray sources as neutrino pulsars
| Authors |
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|---|---|
| Publication date | 2018 |
| Journal | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |
| Volume | Issue number | 476 | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 2867-2873 |
| Organisations |
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| Abstract |
The classical limit on the accretion luminosity of a neutron star is
given by the Eddington luminosity. The advanced models of accretion on
to magnetized neutron stars account for the appearance of magnetically
confined accretion columns and allow the accretion luminosity to be
higher than the Eddington value by a factor of tens. However, the recent
discovery of pulsations from ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) in NGC
5907 demonstrates that the accretion luminosity can exceed the Eddington
value up to by a factor of 500. We propose a model explaining
observational properties of ULX-1 in NGC 5907 without any ad hoc
assumptions. We show that the accretion column at extreme luminosity
becomes advective. Enormous energy release within a small geometrical
volume and advection result in very high temperatures at the bottom of
accretion column, which demand to account for the energy losses due to
neutrino emission which can be even more effective than the radiation
energy losses. We show that the total luminosity at the mass accretion
rates above 1021 g s-1 is dominated by the
neutrino emission similarly to the case of core-collapse supernovae. We
argue that the accretion rate measurements based on detected photon
luminosity in case of bright ULXs powered by neutron stars can be
largely underestimated due to intense neutrino emission. The recently
discovered pulsating ULX-1 in galaxy NGC 5907 with photon luminosity of
{˜ } 10^{41} {erg s^{-1}} is expected to be even brighter in
neutrinos and is thus the first known Neutrino Pulsar.
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| Document type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Published at | https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty379 |
| Other links | http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.476.2867M |
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