The X-ray Emission Properties of Rotation-Powered Pulsars
Abstract
Chandra and XMM-Newton have measured spectra and/or pulse profiles from more than 80 rotation-powered pulsars in the past 8 1/2 years of their life time. Back in 1997 at the end of the ROSAT mission, the number of detected pulsars was roughly only one third of that. Nevertheless, the ROSAT data allowed for the first time to investigate the spectral and temporal emission properties of
pulsars for a larger sample. Becker & Trümper (1997) found the pulsars' X-ray efficiency in the 0.1-2.4 keV band to be 10^-3 times their spin-down energy. Today, the sample of X-ray detected pulsars is much more complete than in 1997, including high S/N spectra from cooling neutron stars, million years old pulsars and recycled millisecond pulsars. We used the full sample of X-ray detected pulsars to determine the pulsars' X-ray efficiency in the soft and hard band and to search for a spectral evolution with the pulsars' spin-down age.- Publication:
-
AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #10
- Pub Date:
- March 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008HEAD...10.1203B