Thursday, January 12, 2012

1201.2381 (Rodrigo Negreiros et al.)

Thermal Evolution of Neutron Stars in 2 Dimensions    [PDF]

Rodrigo Negreiros, Stefan Schramm, Fridolin Weber
That are many factors that contribute to breaking the spherical symmetry of a neutron star. Most notably amongst those is rotation, magnetic field and/or accretion. Such phenomena are known to influence not only the macroscopic structure of the star, but also its microscopic composition. The breaking of symmetry in the microscopic and macroscopic realms might lead to anisotropic heat transport, which in turn might alter the thermal evolution of the object. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cooling of rapidly rotating neutron stars, with the ultimate goal of understanding the effects of a 2D structure on thermal evolution. The equations that govern the thermal evolution of rotating neutron stars are presented, and the cooling of objects with different frequencies is computed numerically. We show that rotation can significantly influence the thermal evolution of neutron stars. Amongst the major modifications introduced by the 2D structure is the appearance of a hot spot on the poles, and an increase of the thermal coupling time of the core and the crust of the star. We also show that this increase is independent of the microscopic properties of the core, and depends only on the frequency of the object.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2381

No comments:

Post a Comment