paper

PSR 0943+10: a bare strange star?

arXiv:astro-ph/9907132 · doi:10.1086/312226

Abstract

Recent work by Rankin & Deshpande strongly suggests that there exist strong ``micro-storms'' rotating around the magnetic axis of the 1.1s pulsar PSR 0943+10. Such a feature hints that most probably the large-voltage vacuum gap proposed by Ruderman & Sutherland (RS) does exist in the pulsar polar cap. However, there are severe arguments against the formation of the RS-type gap in pulsars, since the binding energies of both the Fe ions and the electrons in a neutron star's surface layer is too small to prevent thermionic ejection of the particles from the surface. Here we propose that PSR 0943+10 (probably also most of the other ``drifting'' pulsars) might be bare strange stars rather than normal neutron stars, in which the ``binding energy'' at the surface is merely infinity either for the case of ``pulsar'' or ``anti-pulsar''. It is further proposed that identifying a drifting pulsar as an anti-pulsar is the key criterion to distinguish strange stars from neutron stars.

4 pages, no figures, LaTeX, accepted 1999 July 9 by ApJ Letters

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