Further constraints on neutron star crustal properties in the low-mass X-ray binary 1RXS J180408.9-342058

We report on two new quiescent XMM-Newton observations (in addition to the earlier Swift/XRT and XMM-Newton coverage) of the cooling neutron star crust in the low-mass X-ray binary 1RXS J180408.9-342058. Its crust was heated during the ∼4.5 month accretion outburst of the source. From our quiescent observations, fitting the spectra with a neutron star atmosphere model, we found that the crust had cooled from ∼100 to ∼73 eV from ∼8 to ∼479 d after the end of its outburst. However, during the most recent observation, taken ∼860 d after the end of the outburst, we found that the crust appeared not to have cooled further. This suggested that the crust had returned to thermal equilibrium with the neutron star core. We model the quiescent thermal evolution with the theoretical crustal cooling code NSCool and find that the source requires a shallow heat source, in addition to the standard deep crustal heating processes, contributing ∼0.9 MeV per accreted nucleon during outburst to explain its observed temperature decay. Our high quality XMM-Newton data required an additional hard component to adequately fit the spectra. This slightly complicates our interpretation of the quiescent data of 1RXS J180408.9-342058. The origin of this component is not fully understood.