Likely optical counterpart of the cool middle-aged pulsar J1957+5033
arXiv:2205.13606 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1293
Abstract
The 840 kyr old pulsar PSR J1957+5033, detected so far only in - and X-rays, is a nearby and rather cool neutron star with a temperature of 0.2--0.3 MK, a distance of $\la$1 kpc, and a small colour reddening excess . These properties make it an ideal candidate to detect in the optical to get additional constraints on its parameters. We thus performed the first deep optical observations of the pulsar with the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias in the band and found its possible counterpart with . The counterpart candidate position is consistent with the X-ray coordinates of the pulsar within the 0.5 arcsec accuracy. Assuming that this is the real counterpart, we analysed the pulsar X-ray spectrum together with the derived optical flux density. As a result, we found that the thermal emission from the bulk surface of the cooling neutron star can significantly contribute to its optical flux. Our multi-wavelength spectral analysis favours the pulsar nature of the detected optical source, since it provides physically adequate parameters of the pulsar emission. We show that the optical data can provide new constraints on the pulsar temperature and distance.
arXiv comment7 pages, 3 figures, published in MNRAS
References in corpus (20)
- emcee: The MCMC Hammer
- Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
- The Gaia mission
- On the Absorption of X-rays in the Interstellar Medium
- Cosmic-Ray Rejection by Laplacian Edge Detection
- The Pan-STARRS1 Photometric System
- The thermal radiation of the isolated neutron star RX J1856.5-3754 observed with Chandra and XMM-Newton
- Eight gamma-ray pulsars discovered in blind frequency searches of Fermi LAT data
- Magnetic Hydrogen Atmosphere Models and the Neutron Star RX J1856.5-3754
- Probing X-ray Absorption and Optical Extinction in the Interstellar Medium Using Chandra Observations of Supernova Remnants
- Thermal luminosities of cooling neutron stars
- Timing Gamma-ray Pulsars with the Fermi Large Area Telescope: Timing Noise and Astrometry
- New Optical/UV Counterparts and the Spectral Energy Distributions of Nearby, Thermally Emitting, Isolated Neutron Stars
- Radio-quiet and radio-loud pulsars: similar in Gamma-rays but different in X-rays
- On the PSR B1133+16 optical counterpart
- Deep optical observations of the gamma-ray pulsar J0357+3205
- A candidate optical counterpart to the middle-aged gamma-ray pulsar PSR J1741-2054
- Middle aged -ray pulsar J1957+5033 in X-rays: pulsations, thermal emission and nebula
- Hubble Space Telescope observations of the old pulsar PSR J0108-1431
- PSR B0656+14: the unified outlook from the infrared to X-rays