Thermal state of transiently accreting neutron stars

¹ Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, Politekhnicheskaya 26, 194021 St.-Petersburg, Russia
² Copernicus Astronomical Center, Bartycka 18, 00-716 Warsaw, Poland e-mail: yak@astro.ioffe.ru, ksen@astro.ioffe.ru, haensel@camk.edu.pl

Corresponding author: D. Yakovlev, yak@astro.ioffe.ru

Received: 3 September 2002
Accepted: 17 April 2003

Abstract

We study thermal states of transiently accreting neutron stars (with mean accretion rates   yr^-1) determined by the deep crustal heating of accreted matter sinking into stellar interiors. We formalize a direct correspondence of this problem to the problem of cooling neutron stars. Using a simple toy model we analyze the most important factors which affect the thermal states of accreting stars: a strong superfluidity in the cores of low-mass stars and a fast neutrino emission (in nucleon, pion-condensed, kaon-condensed, or quark phases of dense matter) in the cores of high-mass stars. We briefly compare the results with the observations of soft X-ray transients in quiescence. If the upper limit on the quiescent thermal luminosity of the neutron star in SAX J1808.4–3658 (Campana et al. [CITE]) is associated with deep crustal heating, it favors the model of nucleon neutron-star cores with switched-on direct Urca process.