Thermonuclear (type-I) X-ray bursts arise on the surface of neutron stars in binary systems, and offer a powerful probe of the neutron star environment as well as the nuclear reactions that power them. Efforts to match observed burst to numerical simulations have been fairly limited to date, partially because of the dearth of high-quality, well characterised burst measurements. To address this issue, we have assembled a set of "reference" bursts featuring examples of a number of different types of bursts, presented in a paper which has just been accepted by PASA. We also hope that the observed bursts will serve as test cases for numerical codes in order to assess the variations between those codes, in order to quantify the fundamental uncertainty of burst simulations.

Read the paper arXiv:1703.07485

Labels: 2017, thermonuclear bursts