Journal article
ELECTROMAGNETIC SPINDOWN OF A TRANSIENT ACCRETING MILLISECOND PULSAR DURING QUIESCENCE
A Melatos, A Mastrano
Astrophysical Journal | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2016
Abstract
The measured spindown rates in quiescence of the transient accreting millisecond pulsars IGR J00291+5934, XTE J1751-305, SAX J1808.4-3658, and Swift J1756.9-2508 have been used to estimate the magnetic moments of these objects assuming standard magnetic dipole braking. It is shown that this approach leads to an overestimate if the amount of residual accretion is enough to distort the magnetosphere away from a force-free configuration through magnetospheric mass loading or crushing, so that the lever arm of the braking torque migrates inside the light cylinder. We derive an alternative spindown formula and calculate the residual accretion rates where the formula is applicable. As a demonstrat..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant
Funding Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP110103347). We thank the two anonymous referees for their comments, which substantially improved the paper. AMe thanks Deepto Chakrabarty and Scott Hughes for stimulating discussions during a sabbatical visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where the ideas behind the paper were first formulated.