Skip to main content

NEWBORN PULSARS WITH A HIDDEN MAGNETIC FIELD


Image: Crab nebula as seen by Chandra. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/F. Seward et al.

In the center of several supernova remnants there are pulsars with significantly lower values of the dipolar magnetic field than the average radio-pulsar population (10^{12}G). A possible explanation requires the slow rotation of the proto-neutron star at birth, which is unable to amplify its magnetic field to typical pulsar levels.


However, recent studies have shown that, even in the absence of rapid rotation, magnetic fields in pulsars can be amplified by other mechanisms such as convection and the standing accretion shock instability.
An alternative possibility, the hidden magnetic field scenario, considers the accretion of the fallback of the supernova debris onto the neutron star as responsible for the submergence (or screening) of the field and its apparently low value. A high accretion rate can compress the magnetic field of the NS which can eventually be buried into the neutron star crust. As a result, the value of the external magnetic field would be significantly lower than the internal 'hidden' magnetic field.

Credit: Torres-Forné et al. 2016
 Once  the  accretion  process  stops,  the  magnetic  field  might eventually reemerge.
The main conclusion of a recent paper (Torres-Forné et al. 2016) is that typical magnetic fields of a few times 10^{12}G can be buried by accreting only 0.001-0.01 solar masses, a relatively modest amount of mass. The field would  only  reemerge  after a few thousand years.
On the contrary, magnetar-like field strengths are much harder to screen and the required accreted mass is very large,  in  some  cases  so  large that the neutron star would collapse to a black hole. The anomalously weak magnetic fields should be common in very young neutron stars.

Read more>>
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03823v2.pdf
http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/456/4/3813.abstract

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A METHOD TO TEST THE EXISTENCE OF REGULAR BLACK HOLES

Illustration of a black hole. Image Credit & Copyright: Alain Riazuelo The existence of the singularity is an intrinsic problem of the General Relativity (GR). At the fundamentally level, the resolution of the problem of the singularity lies with the expectation that under situations where quantum effects become strong, the behavior of gravity could possibly greatly deviate from that predicted by the classical theory of GR. Regular black hole solution are proposed with the same spacetime geometry outside the horizon as the traditional black hole, but bears no singularity inside. Whether or not black hole singularities should exist, they would be covered by the black hole horizon. The black hole horizon serves as an information curtain hindering outside observers from directly observing the interior structure of the black hole, and determining that whether or not the black hole singularity does really exist. A method is needed to check the correctness of the new constructions ...

ABOUT THE FORMATION OF THE COLD CLASSICAL KUIPER BELT

Image: The Kuiper Belt. Credit: NASA . The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the Solar System beyond the planets, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt (the circumstellar disc located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter), but it is far larger-20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive.

A BINARY ORIGIN FOR A CENTRAL COMPACT OBJECT (CCO)?

Figure: False-Colour X-ray and infrared emission image from the core of the infrared shell. The RGB colours correspond to Chandra X-ray 0.2-10 keV (blue), IRAC infrared 8 μm (green), and HPACS 70 μm (red) data. The intensity scale is logarithmic for all channels. Overlaid are equal brightness levels from the MIPS 24 μm band. Note that around the CCO the infrared emission is suppressed in the 70 μm band and enhanced in the 24 μm band suggesting higher dust temperature. Credit: Doroshenko et al 2016 Central compact objects (CCOs) are thought to be young isolated neutron stars that were born during the preceding core-collapse supernova explosion.