At COSPAR: EoS Introduction (E15)

Here is a quick summary of this morning's session.

Peter Jonker presented how to observationally constrain the EoS of neutron stars and also talked about the cooling of neutron stars. He briefly mentioned the upcoming Galactic Belt Survey, a series of observation with Chandra covering a total of 6x1 arcmin in order to find more X-ray transient near the galactic plane. Overall, I found that it was an excellent presentation outlining the crucial points of LMXBs observations and quoting several well-known objects like 4U 1608-52, Cen X-4, the long duration transient KS 1731-260, or the very faint transient SAX J1808.4-3657.

This was then followed by a talk by Pawel Haensel presenting the theory behind all this. As accreting matter compresses the inner crust, material gets out of equilibrium and electron capture/neutron emission occur, releasing 1.5-2 MeV per accreted nucleon. He also talked about the timescales involved.

Finally, Nathalie Degenaar gave a very interesting talk about very faint X-ray transients with outburst luminosities as low as 10^34 erg/s. In two case, a faint burst was happening followed by a Type 1 X-ray burst suggesting right away that this small burst could be a precursor to the Type 1 burst.

Tomorrow's half day session will be fully dedicated to the methods of constraining the EoS using accreting neutron stars. I am looking forward to the presentation by R. Wijnands, N. Webb, and P. Ray.