Kavli Affiliate: Lijing Shao
| First 5 Authors: Joseph Bramante, Katherine Mack, Nirmal Raj, Lijing Shao, Narayani Tyagi
| Summary:
Neutron stars provide a compelling testing ground for gravity, nuclear
dynamics, and physics beyond the Standard Model, and so it will be useful to
locate the neutron stars nearest to Earth. To that end, we revisit pulsar
distance estimates extracted from the dispersion measure of pulsar radio waves
scattering on electrons. In particular, we create a new electron density map
for the local kiloparsec by fitting to parallax measurements of the nearest
pulsars, which complements existing maps that are fit on the Galactic scale.
This “near-Earth” electron density map implies that pulsars previously
estimated to be 100-200 pc away may be as close as tens of parsecs away, which
motivates a parallax-based measurement campaign to follow-up on these very-near
candidate pulsars. Such nearby neutron stars would be valuable laboratories for
testing fundamental physics phenomena, including several late-stage neutron
star heating mechanisms, using current and forthcoming telescopes. We
illustrate this by estimating the sensitivities of the upcoming Extremely Large
Telescope and Thirty Meter Telescope to neutron stars heated by dark matter
capture.
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