Spin--Down Power in Astrophysics

Abstract

While the accretion power in astrophysics has been studied in many astronomical environments, the ``spin--down power'' is often neglected. In this essay I demonstrate that the spin--down power alone may drive a rotating system from sub-critical condition to critical condition with a small but finite probability. In the case of an isolated spinning-down neutron star, the star may undergo a quark--hadron phase transition in its center and become observable as a soft gamma repeater or a cosmological gamma--ray burst. For a spinning--down white dwarf, its Chandrasekhar mass limit will decrease and may reach the stellar mass, then the star explodes to a type Ia supernova. Gravitational wave detectors may be able to test these models.

4 pages, revtex, accepted for publications in J. General Relativity and Gravitation August 2002 issue. This essay received an ``honorable mention'' in the 2001 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation

References in corpus (2)

• Discovery of a magnetar associated with the Soft Gamma Repeater SGR 1900+14
• Comment on ``Signal of Quark Deconfinement in the Timing Structure of Pulsar Spin-Down''

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Carbon-Oxygen White Dwarfs Accreting CO-Rich Matter I: A Comparison Between Rotating and Non-Rotating Models
• Quark core formation in spinning-down pulsars