Multiwavelength Analysis of PSR J0437-4715 with Pulse Profile Modeling

Abstract

We present a multi-wavelength analysis of the nearby millisecond pulsar PSR J0437--4715, combining Hubble Space Telescope (HST) far-ultraviolet, ROSAT soft X-ray, and XMM-Newton X-ray data, to model its broadband emission and energy-resolved pulse profiles, and infer key stellar parameters via Bayesian inference. The broadband emission includes cold thermal, hot thermal, and non-thermal components: cold bulk surface emission is modeled with a non-magnetized partially-ionized hydrogen atmosphere; hot-spot emission adopts the pulse profile modeling technique with a non-magnetized fully-ionized hydrogen atmosphere model; and non-thermal emission is included as a phase-invariant power-law component. By adopting an informative prior on the hot-spot geometry informed by radio polarization position angle measurements, the joint multi-instrument analysis yields a statistically viable and radio-consistent solution with a gravitational mass of 1.38$\pm$0.03~M${}_{\odot }$ and an equatorial circumferential radius of 13.25${}_{-0.35}^{+0.34}$~km (68\% confidence intervals). The hot-spot geometry consists of two spherical caps with uniform temperature distributions: the primary hot spot is situated at a colatitude of $\approx$130${}^{\circ }$, and the secondary hot spot lies at a colatitude of $\approx$9${}^{\circ }$, close to the north pole. It yields tighter radius constraints than HST+ROSAT fits and shifts the radius posterior distribution to larger values relative to NICER-only fits. This work demonstrates the importance of multi-wavelength data in refining neutron star mass-radius measurements and resolving geometric degeneracies.

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