Standard Cooling of Rapidly Rotating Isolated Neutron Stars in 2D

Abstract

We study the long-term thermal evolution of axisymmetric rotating neutron stars in full general relativity. To this aim, we develop NSCool 2D Rot , a major upgrade to the 1D neutron stars thermal evolution code NSCool by Page. As a first application of our new code, we address the standard cooling of isolated neutron stars with rotation frequencies up to the mass shedding limit. We investigate the effects of the equation of state (EOS) by considering different combinations of core and crust EOSs. The results indicate complex time-dependent evolution of temperature distribution throughout the whole volume of the star, and in particular, in the crust. We show that most of that complexity can be attributed to the formation of a heat blob in the crust and the latitude dependence of the heat diffusion timescale through the crust.

Keywords

• Neutron stars
• Neutron star cores
• X-ray point sources