XMM-Newton X-ray emission from a swinging pulsar
Minimum credit line: Image courtesy of A. Papitto and ESA. (for details, see Conditions of Use).
Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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| About this Image |
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Millisecond radio pulsars spin much faster than expected for their old age. They are associated to X-ray bright accreting binary systems. For this reason, it is believed that accretion in a binary system is the mechanism responsible for their fast rotation: as an "aging" pulsar starts to accrete matter from a stellar companion, not only does it start to be visible in X-rays but it can also increase its angular momentum.
This hypothesis has been recently confirmed by the Integral/XMM-Newton detection of IGR J18245–2452, an X-ray millisecond pulsar whose spin and orbital parameters are coincident with a previously known radio pulsar that never showed X-ray emission before.
The newly found pulsar therefore provides the evolutionary link between X-ray bright millisecond pulsars that are powered by accretion and their rotation-driven, radio-bright counterparts, and it shows that a neutron star can swing between these two states over a time interval as short as a few weeks.
The image shows the X-ray light curve (blue) and the pulse profile (red) of IGR J18245–2452 obtained from XMM-Newton data: the pulse profile has been obtained by dividing the light curve in intervals of length equal to the spin period of the neutron star (3.9 ms) and averaging them out. The orbit of IGR J18245–2452 was reconstructed by measuring the delay in pulse arrival time that is due to the orbital motion of the neutron star.
| For More Information |
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- Read the Press Release
- Read the Journal article
- Query XSA archive for XMM-Newton data in the field of IGR J18245-2452
- Astronomical database entries for IGR J18245-2452;
- Query SIMBAD for more IGR J18245-2452 data
- For unfamiliar terms, visit the XMM-Newton Astronomical Glossary
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