Measuring the radius of neutron stars with and other results from the NICER mission

Séminaire IPAG de Sébastien Guillot (IRAP), jeudi 5 décembre 2019 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) has been in operation from the International Space Station since June 2017. Its primary science goals is to measure the radius and mass of millisecond pulsars, fast-spinning X-ray emitting neutron stars.

To achieve this, a handful of these pulsars have been observed by NICER, totalling more than 1 Megaseconds each. By accurately modelling their phase-energy resolved light curves, originating from their hot polar caps, one can obtain measurements of the neutron stars’ masses and radii.

In this presentation, I will summarise the observational data, the modelling techniques, and I will show the first results for the millisecond pulsar PSR J0030+0451, which found a radius with 10% uncertainties. These results place interesting constraints on the equation of state of dense matter, a missing piece of nuclear physics.

In this presentation, I will also show other interesting results on millisecond pulsars from the NICER mission.