Fingerprinting X-ray bursters
The first accretion-powered millisecond pulsar ever found,
SAX 1808.4—3658 is a remarkable object, also showing thermonuclear
bursts during it's infrequent outbursts. Over several years PhD student Adelle Goodwin has
been trying to match the bursts observed during it's 2002 outburst with
the predictions of a numerical model.
This exercise can be thought of as
searching exhaustively for a set of parameters which (in the model) reproduce
the observed properties of the bursts.
Now that we have
an improved
formula for determining the energy of these bursts, she built a
Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) code
to constrain system parameters including neutron star mass and radius for
the source. Her paper describing the study, and it's results, has now been
published by
MNRAS
Read the paper (MNRAS 490, 2228, 2019)