Urca Cooling in Neutron Star Crusts and Oceans: Effects of Nuclear Excitations
| Autor: | G. Wendell Misch, Long-Jun Wang, Liang Tan, Yang Sun, Zhipan Li |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Physics
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) Nuclear Theory Electron capture Astrophysics::High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Nuclear structure General Physics and Astronomy FOS: Physical sciences Boltzmann distribution Luminosity Nuclear physics Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) Neutron star Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Atomic nucleus Neutrino Nuclear Experiment Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Urca process Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) |
| Zdroj: | Physical review letters. 127(17) |
| ISSN: | 1079-7114 |
| Popis: | The excited-state structure of atomic nuclei can modify nuclear processes in stellar environments. In this Letter, we study the influence of nuclear excitations on Urca cooling (repeated back-and-forth $\ensuremath{\beta}$ decay and electron capture in a pair of nuclear isotopes) in the crust and ocean of neutron stars. We provide for the first time an expression for Urca process neutrino luminosity which accounts for a thermal Boltzmann distribution of excited states in both members of an Urca pair. We use our new formula with state-of-the-art nuclear structure inputs to compute neutrino luminosities of candidate Urca cooling pairs. Our nuclear inputs consist of the latest experimental data supplemented with calculations using the projected shell model. We show that, in contrast to previous results that only consider the ground states of both nuclei in the pair, our calculated neutrino luminosities for different Urca pairs vary sensitively with the environment temperature and can be radically different from those obtained in the one-transition approximation. We find that nuclear excitations can lead to an enhancement in total Urca neutrino luminosities in the accreted neutron star crust by about 5 times as compared with the previous Urca results, which is expected to cause significant observational effects. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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