Formation of millisecond pulsars with wide orbits

Abstract

Abstract Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are a kind of radio pulsars with short spin periods, playing a key role in many aspects of stellar astrophysics. In recent years, some more MSPs with wide orbits ($>30\, \rm d$) have been discovered, but their origin is still highly unclear. In the present work, according to an adiabatic power-law assumption for the mass-transfer process, we carried out a large number of complete binary evolution computations for the formation of MSPs with wide orbits through the iron core-collapse supernova (CCSN) channel, in which a neutron star (NS) originating from a CCSN accretes matter from a red-giant (RG) star and spun up to millisecond periods. We found that this channel can form the observed MSPs with wide orbits in the range of 30 − 1200 d, in which the WD companions have masses in the range of $0.28\!-\!0.55\, \rm M_{\odot }$. We also found that almost all the observed MSPs can be reproduced by this channel in the WD companion mass versus orbital period diagram. We estimate that the Galactic numbers of the resulting MSPs from the CCSN channel are in the range of ∼4.8–8.5 × 105. Compared with the accretion-induced collapse channel, the CCSN channel provides a main way to produce MSPs with wide orbits.