Pulsars, transients and relativistic astrophysics

Abstract:

Lasair is the UK Community Broker for transient alerts from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. We explain the system’s capabilities, how users can achieve their scientific goals, and how Lasair is implemented. Lasair offers users a kit of parts that they can use to build filters to concentrate their desired alerts. The kit has novel light-curve features, sky context, watchlists of special sky objects and regions of the sky, dynamic cross-matching with catalogues of known astronomical sources, and classifications and annotations from other users and partner projects. These resources can be shared with other users, copied, and modified. Lasair offers real-time machine-to-machine notifications of filtered transient alerts. Even though the Rubin Observatory is not yet complete, Lasair is a mature system: it has been processing and serving data from the similarly formatted stream of the Zwicky Transient Facility alerts.

Abstract:

We use data from the MeerTime project on the MeerKAT telescope to ask whether the radio emission properties of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) and slowly rotating, younger pulsars (SPs) are similar or different. We show that the flux density spectra of both populations are similarly steep, and the widths of MSP profiles obey the same dependence on the rotational period as slow pulsars. We also show that the polarization of MSPs has similar properties to slow pulsars. The commonly used pseudo-luminosity of pulsars, defined as the product of the flux density and the distance squared, is not appropriate for drawing conclusions about the relative intrinsic radio luminosity of SPs and MSPs. We show that it is possible to scale the pseudo-luminosity to account for the pulse duty cycle and the solid angle of the radio beam, in such a way that MSPs and SPs do not show clear differences in intrinsic luminosity. The data therefore support common emission physics between the two populations in spite of orders of magnitude difference in their period derivatives and inferred, surface, dipole magnetic field strengths.

Abstract:

We present the first X-ray spectropolarimetric results for Cygnus X-1 in its soft state from a campaign of five IXPE observations conducted during 2023 May–June. Companion multiwavelength data during the campaign are likewise shown. The 2–8 keV X-rays exhibit a net polarization degree PD = 1.99% ± 0.13% (68% confidence). The polarization signal is found to increase with energy across the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer’s (IXPE) 2–8 keV bandpass. The polarized X-rays exhibit an energy-independent polarization angle of PA = −25.°7 ± 1.°8 east of north (68% confidence). This is consistent with being aligned to Cyg X-1’s au-scale compact radio jet and its parsec-scale radio lobes. In comparison to earlier hard-state observations, the soft state exhibits a factor of 2 lower polarization degree but a similar trend with energy and a similar (also energy-independent) position angle. When scaling by the natural unit of the disk temperature, we find the appearance of a consistent trend line in the polarization degree between the soft and hard states. Our favored polarimetric model indicates that Cyg X-1’s spin is likely high (a * ≳ 0.96). The substantial X-ray polarization in Cyg X-1's soft state is most readily explained as resulting from a large portion of X-rays emitted from the disk returning and reflecting off the disk surface, generating a high polarization degree and a polarization direction parallel to the black hole spin axis and radio jet. In IXPE’s bandpass, the polarization signal is dominated by the returning reflection emission. This constitutes polarimetric evidence for strong gravitational lensing of X-rays close to the black hole.