Fully self-consistent thermal evolution studies of rotating neutron stars

¹ Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal Fluminense 20420 Niteroi RJ Brazil
e-mail: negreiros@if.uff.br
² FIAS, Goethe University, Ruth Moufang Str. 1, 60438 Frankfurt, Germany
³ Department of Physics, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, California 92182, USA
⁴ Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA

Received: 13 January 2017
Accepted: 14 April 2017

Abstract

In this work we study the thermal evolution of rotating, axis-symmetric neutron stars, which are subjected to structural and compositional changes during spin-down. Our aim is to go beyond standard thermal evolution calculations where neutron stars are considered spherically-symmetric and with a static, “frozen-in” composition. Building on previous work, we carry out fully self-consistent thermal evolution calculations where the neutron star has an axis-symmetric, time-dependent structure. Such an approach allows us to consider, during the thermal evolution, changes of the star’s geometry as well as its microscopic particle population. As a proof-of-concept, we study the thermal evolution of a neutron star subjected to magnetic braking spin-down. We show that the spin-evolution, combined with the accompanying structural and compositional changes lead to a substantially distinct thermal evolution scenario.