Thermal X-ray emission from massive, fast rotating, highly magnetized white dwarfs

Abstract

There is solid observational evidence on the existence of massive, $M\sim 1M_{\odot }$, highly magnetized white dwarfs (WDs) with surface magnetic fields up to $B\sim 10^9$ G. We show that, if in addition to these features, the star is fast rotating, it can become a rotation-powered pulsar-like WD and emit detectable high-energy radiation. We infer the values of the structure parameters (mass, radius, moment of inertia), magnetic field, rotation period and spin-down rates of a WD pulsar death-line. We show that WDs above the death-line emit blackbody radiation in the soft X-ray band via the magnetic polar cap heating by back flowing pair-created particle bombardment and discuss as an example the X-ray emission of soft gamma-repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars within the WD model.

To appear in MNRAS

References in corpus (5)

• Magnetic White Dwarfs
• New white dwarf stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 10
• A radio pulsing white dwarf binary star
• Magnetar-like activity from the central compact object in the SNR RCW103
• Evidence for the magnetar nature of 1E 161348-5055 in RCW 103

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A magnetic white-dwarf accretion model for the anomalous X-ray pulsar 4U 0142+61
• Orbital decay of double white dwarfs: beyond gravitational wave radiation effects
• High-energy gamma-ray emission from SNR G57.2+0.8 hosting SGR J1935+2154
• On the optical transients from double white-dwarf mergers