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Revealing the Most Energetic Light from Pulsars and Their Nebulae pp 19–47Cite as

Pulsars and Pulsar Wind Nebulae

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Abstract

When heavy stars have burned all their nuclear fuel, neutron degeneracy pressure is the last force able to halt their collapse into a black hole. The sudden stop of the free-fall collapse leads to a rebound of the infalling matter triggering an outward shock that blows up the star envelope and powers a Type II supernova. If the mass of the progenitor star does not exceed \(\sim \)20 solar masses [1], the compact remnant core evolves into a neutron star. Otherwise the amount of matter falling back on to the core crosses the maximum neutron star mass and ultimately collapses to form a black hole.

Unusual signals from pulsating radio sources have been recorded at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. The radiation seems to come from local objects within the galaxy, and may be associated with oscillations of white dwarf or neutron stars.

Hewish et al., 1968

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The radio lag refers to the phase lag between the first gamma-ray peak and the main radio peak (a definition of pulse phase can be found in Appendix B). For the computation of the radio lag, Kalapotharakos et al. [21] assumed that the radio emission originates from near the magnetic pole on the pulsar surface.

  2. 2.

    The pair production mechanism in their study is highly idealized and is limited to a pair multiplicity of 10. For details see [23].

  3. 3.

    https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/GLAMCOG/Public+List+of+LAT-Detected+Gamma-Ray+Pulsars, last accessed 06/04/2018.

  4. 4.

    The exponential cut-off in a spectrum is described by the functional relation \(dN/dE \propto \mathrm {e}^{\left( -E/E_c\right) ^b}\), where \(E_c\) defines the cut-off energy. For a simple or pure cut-off, b equals 1, whereas \(b>1\) and \(b<1\) are denoted as super-exponential and sub-exponential cut-offs, respectively.

  5. 5.

    The radio lag refers to the phase lag between the first gamma-ray peak and the main radio peak.

  6. 6.

    Although a strong hint at the \(3.5\, \sigma \) level was reported for the msp psr j0218+4232 [47].

  7. 7.

    For an excellent assessment of the pulsar outer gap models, the reader is referred to [61].

  8. 8.

    For a comprehensive derivation of the formula, see Appendix B in [4].

  9. 9.

    Here the adjective “cold” means that the wind’s thermal energy is much smaller than its magnetic and bulk kinetic energy.

  10. 10.

    \(L_{\mathrm {1-10TeV}}\) denotes the luminosity integrated from 1 to 10 TeV.

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    David Carreto Fidalgo

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Carreto Fidalgo, D. (2019). Pulsars and Pulsar Wind Nebulae. In: Revealing the Most Energetic Light from Pulsars and Their Nebulae. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24194-0_2

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