2024 EOY paper roundup
I'm about to go on leave for the holidays, but a couple of papers to note
that just came out, that I had a little involvement with.
Zhi-Qiang You's paper "The birth mass function of neutron stars" addresses the problem that many of the objects we observe today have had a history of accretion that can significantly increase their mass, so it's a challenge to work backward and infer how they started. This initial mass distribution in turn encodes information about the formative supernova explosions and evolution up to that point. Zhi-Qiang's paper has now been accepted by Nature Astronomy.
Tao Fu's paper "A comprehensive study of type I (thermonuclear) bursts in the new transient SRGA J144459.2−604207" focusses on the remarkable burst behaviour of the 2024-discovered millisecond pulsar, observed with the Chinese Insight-HXMT and NASA's IXPE satellites. During a 2-week outburst this source exhibited 60 thermonuclear bursts, with remarkably consistent profiles and recurrence times. Such "clocked" bursters are key sources for comparison with numerical models. Tao's paper has now been accepted by ApJ.