An ultraluminous nascent millisecond pulsar

Abstract

If the ultraluminous source (ULX) M82 X-2 sustains its measured spin-up value of $\dot{\nu }=10^{-10}{\mathrm{s}}^{-2}$, it will become a millisecond pulsar in less than $10^5$ years. The observed (isotropic) luminosity of $10^{40}$ erg/s also supports the notion that the neutron star will spin up to a millisecond period upon accreting about $0.1{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$---the reported hard X-ray luminosity of this ULX, together with the spin-up value, implies torques consistent with the accretion disk extending down to the vicinity of the stellar surface, as expected for low values of the stellar dipole magnetic field ($B\lesssim 10^9$G). This suggests a new channel of millisecond pulsar formation---in high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs)---and may have implications for studies of gravitational waves, and possibly for the formation of low-mass black holes through accretion-induced collapse.

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References in corpus (14)

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• Intermittent pulsations in an accretion-powered millisecond pulsar
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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems
• Discovery of coherent pulsations from the Ultraluminous X-ray Source NGC 7793 P13
• Pulsing ULXs: tip of the iceberg?
• No magnetars in ULXs
• On the Formation of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources with Neutron Star Accretors: the Case of M82 X-2
• Modeling the light curves of ultraluminous X-ray sources as precession
• Searching for the Donor Stars of ULX Pulsars
• Constraining the dipolar magnetic field of M82 X-2 by the accretion model
• Paving the way to simultaneous multi-wavelength astronomy
• The origin of the bimodal luminosity distribution of ultraluminous X-ray pulsars
• High Energy Gamma Rays from Nebulae Associated with Extragalactic Microquasars and Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources