The LOFT perspective on neutron star thermonuclear bursts: White paper in support of the mission concept of the large observatory for X-ray timing

Technical Report · Wed Jan 14 00:00:00 EST 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1167485· OSTI ID:1167485

in't Zand, J. J.M. ^[1]; Malone, Christopher M. ^[2]; Altamirano, D. ^[3]; Ballantyne, D. R. ^[4]; Bhattacharyya, S. ^[5]; Brown, E. F. ^[6]; Cavecchi, Y. ^[7]; Chakrabarty, D. ^[8]; Chenevez, J. ^[9]; Cumming, A. ^[10]; Degenaar, N. ^[11]; Falanga, M. ^[12]; Galloway, D. K. ^[13]; Heger, A. ^[13]; Jose, J. ^[14]; Keek, L. ^[15]; Linares, M. ^[16]; Mahmoodifar, S. ^[17]; Mendez, M. ^[18]; Miller, M. C. ^[17] ; Paerels, F. B. S. ^[19]; Poutanen, J. ^[20]; Rozanska, A. ^[21]; Schatz, H. ^[22]; Serino, M. ^[23]; Strohmayer, T. E. ^[24]; Suleimanov, V. F. ^[25]; Thielemann, F. -K. ^[26]; Watts, A. L. ^[7]; Weinberg, N. N. ^[27]; Woosley, S. E. ^[28]; Yu, W. ^[29]; Zhang, S. ^[30]; Zingale, M. ^[31]

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1. SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht (The Netherlands)
2. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
3. Univ. of Southampton, Southampton (United Kingdom)
4. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
5. Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (India)
6. Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States)
7. Univ. of Amsterdam, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
8. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
9. Technical Univ. of Denmark, Lyngby (Denmark)
10. McGill Univ., Montreal, QC (Canada)
11. Univ. of Cambridge, Cambridge (United Kingdom)
12. International Space Science Institute, Bern (Switzerland)
13. Monash Univ., VIC (Australia)
14. Univ. Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain); Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain)
15. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
16. Univ. de La Laguna, Tenerife (Spain)
17. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
18. Univ. of Groningen, Groningen (The Netherlands)
19. Columbia Astrophysics Lab., New York, NY (United States)
20. Univ. of Turku, Piikkio (Finland)
21. N. Copernicus Astronomical Center PAS, Warsaw (Poland)
22. National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University
23. Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN)
24. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (United States)
25. Univ. Tubingen, Tubingen (Germany)
26. Univ. Basel, Basel (Switzerland)
27. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (United States)
28. Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, CA (United States)
29. Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai (China)
30. Institute of High-Energy Physics, Beijing (China)
31. Stony Brook Univ., Stony Brook, NY (United States)

The Large Area Detector (LAD) on the Large Observatory For X-ray Timing ( LOFT ), with a 8.5 m 2 photon- collecting area in the 2–30 keV bandpass at CCD-class spectral resolving power (λ/Δλ = 10 – 100), is designed for optimum performance on bright X-ray sources. Thus, it is well-suited to study thermonuclear X-ray bursts from Galactic neutron stars. These bursts will typically yield 2 x 10⁵ photon detections per second in the LAD, which is at least 15 times more than with any other instrument past, current or anticipated. The Wide Field Monitor (WFM) foreseen for LOFT uniquely combines 2–50 keV imaging with large (30%) prompt sky coverage. This will enable the detection of tens of thousands of thermonuclear X-ray bursts during a 3-yr mission, including tens of superbursts. Both numbers are similar or more than the current database gathered in 50 years of X-ray astronomy.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: DOE/LANL; USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-06NA25396
• OSTI ID: 1167485
• Report Number(s): LA-UR-15-20239
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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Astronomy and Astrophysics