Implications Of The Quiescent Lightcurves Of KS 1731-260 And MXB 1659-29

Details Implications Of The Quiescent Lightcurves Of KS 1731-260 And MXB 1659-29 Implications Of The Quiescent Lightcurves Of KS 1731-260 And MXB 1659-29

Mar 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008head...10.1029b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #10, #10.29

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

We assess the implications of the quiescent lightcurves of KS 1731-260 and MXB 1659-29 for the physics of the underlying neutron star crust. We fit the lightcurves and show that for both objects, the luminosity decays as a power-law in time, consistent with the cooling of a thin heated layer. Using the crustal heating models of Gupta et al., we construct lightcurves for different assumptions about the thermal conductivity and heating and interpret the power law lightcurves in terms of the thermal diffusivity, as a function of depth, in the crust. We show, in agreement with Shternin et al., that the inferred thermal diffusion times imply that the inner crust has a high thermal conductivity, consistent with a low impurity concentration. We discuss how the inferred crust properties compare with the inferred superburst ignition depth from KS 1731-260, and predict that future observations of KS 1731-260 will detect a steepening of the power law decay as the cooling front penetrates into the inner crust. Support for this work was provided by NASA through Chandra Award Number TM7-8003X issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center. This work is also supported by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics under NSF-PFC grant PHY 02-16783, NSERC, Le Fonds Quebecois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

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