Pair Winds in Schwarzschild Spacetime with Application to Strange Stars

Abstract

We present the results of numerical simulations of stationary, spherically outflowing, electron-positron pair winds, with total luminosities in the range 10^{34}--10^{42} ergs/s. In the concrete example described here, the wind injection source is a hot, bare, strange star, predicted to be a powerful source of pairs created by the Coulomb barrier at the quark surface. We find that photons dominate in the emerging emission, and the emerging photon spectrum is rather hard and differs substantially from the thermal spectrum expected from a neutron star with the same luminosity. This might help distinguish the putative bare strange stars from neutron stars.

arXiv comment3 pages, 2 figures, Invited talk at 11th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, Berlin, July 2006