November 13, 2026: Dr. Michela Rigoselli
Affiliation: INAF IASF-Milano, Italy
Title: An X-ray view of isolated neutron stars
Abstract: The X-ray spectra of isolated neutron stars (INS) typically include a thermal component, that comes from the cooling surface, and a non-thermal component, produced by highly-relativistic particles accelerated in the stellar magnetosphere. Hot spots from returning currents can also be detected. Middle-aged pulsars exhibit a mixture of these components, but other flavours of INS, that show a large variety of physical parameters (such as spin period, magnetic field and age) emit only thermal X-rays. These are usually detected either by large serendipitous datasets from pointed X-ray observations or from searches in the data of all-sky surveys. The connection between these thermally-emitting INS, the magnetars, and the ordinary pulsars, is one of the current challenges in the study of neutron stars.
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