Rotation and cooling of neutron stars

Abstract

AbstractDriven by the loss of energy, isolated rotating neutron stars (pulsars) are gradually slowing down to lower frequencies, which increases the tremendous compression of the matter inside of them. This increase in compression changes both the global properties of rotating neutron stars as well as their hadronic core compositions. Both effects may register themselves observationally in the thermal evolution of such stars, as demonstrated in this work. The rotation‐driven particle process which we consider here is the direct Urca (DU) process, which is known to become operative in neutron stars if the number of protons in the stellar core exceeds a critical limit of around 11 % to 15 %. We find that neutron stars spinning down from moderately high rotation rates of a few hundred Hertz may be creating just the right conditions where the DU process becomes operative, leading to an observable effect (enhanced cooling) in the temperature evolution of such neutron stars. We will also study the thermal evolution of neutron stars whose spherical symmetry has been broken due to non‐zero rotation. For this we will derive the energy balance and transport equations, taking into account the metric of a rotating fluid distribution and solve these equations numerically. (© 2014 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)