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MS.AMU.MG11

PAIR WINDS IN SCHWARZSCHILD SPACETIME WITH APPLICATION TO STRANGE STARS

A.G. AKSENOV Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, B. Cheremushkinskaya, 25, Moscow 117218, Russia E-mail: alexei.aksenov@itep.ru M. MILGROM and V.V. USOV Center for Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot 76100, Israel E-mail: moti.milgrom@weizmann.ac.il vladimir.usov@weizmann.ac.il We present the results of numerical simulations of stationary, spherically outowing, e pair winds, with total luminosities in the range 1034 1042 ergs s1 . In the concrete example described here, the wind injection source is a hot, bare, strange star, predicted to be a powerful source of e pairs created by the Coulomb barrier at the quark surface. We nd that photons dominate in the emerging emission, and the emerging photon spectrum is rather hard and diers substantially from the thermal spectrum expected from a neutron star with the same luminosity. This might help distinguish the putative bare strange stars from neutron stars.

arXiv:astro-ph/0701235v1 9 Jan 2007

1. Introduction For an electron-positron (e ) wind out-owing spherically from a surface of radius R there is a maximum pair luminosity, Lmax = 4me c3 R2 /T 1036 (R/106 cm)2 ergs s1 , beyond which the pairs annihilate signicantly before they escape, where is the pair bulk Lorentz factor, and T the Thomson cross section. Recently we developed a numerical code for solving the relativistic kinetic Boltzmann equations for pairs and photons in Schwarzschild geometry. Using this we considered a spherically out-owing, non-relativistic ( 1) pair winds with injected pair luminosity L in the range 1034 1042 ergs s1 , that 2 6 max is (10 10 )L (Aksenov et al. 2003, 2004, 2005). While our numerical code can be more generally employed, the results presented in this paper are for a hot, bare, strange star as the wind injection source. Such stars are thought to be powerful (up to 1051 ergs s1 ) sources of pairs created by the Coulomb barrier at the quark surface (Usov 1998, 2001). 2. Formulation of the problem We consider an e pair wind that ows away from a hot, bare, unmagnetized, nonrotating, strange star. Space-time outside the star is described by Schwarzschilds metric with the line element ds2 = e2 c2 dt2 + e2 dr2 + r2 (d2 + sin2 d2 ) , where e = (1 rg /r)
1/2

(1)

and rg = 2GM/c 2.95 10 (M/M ) cm.

1

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We use the general relativistic Boltzmann equations for the pairs and photons, whereby the distribution function for the particles of type i, fi (p, , r, t), satises 1 e e fi p3 f i + 2 (r2 e i fi ) 2 c t r r p p i i (i q fi ). q (1 2 )e fi = i i r q

(2)

Here, is the cosine of the angle between the radius and the particle momentum p, p = |p|, e = ve /c, = 1, and ve is the velocity of electrons and positrons. Also, i is the emission coecient for the production of a particle of type i via the q physical process labelled by q, and q is the corresponding absorption coecient. i The processes we include are listed in the following Table.

Basic Two-Body Interaction Mller and Bhaba scattering ee ee Compton scattering e e Pair annihilation e+ e Photon-photon pair production e+ e

Radiative Variant

Bremsstrahlung ee ee Double Compton scattering e e Three photon annihilation e+ e

3. Numerical results For injected pair luminosity L higher than 1034 ergs s1 , the emerging emission consists mostly of photons (see Fig. 1, left panel). This simply reects the fact that in this case the pair annihilation time tann (ne T c)1 is less than the escape time max 1043 s1 tesc R/c. There is an upper limit to the rate of emerging pairs Ne (see Fig. 1, right panel). As L increases from 1034 to 1042 ergs s1 , the mean energy of emergent photons decreases from 400 keV to 40 keV, as the spectrum changes in shape from that of a wide annihilation line to nearly a blackbody spectrum with a high energy (> 100 keV) tail (see Fig.2).

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Fig. 1. LEFT: The fractional emerging luminosities in pairs (dashed line) and photons (solid line) as functions of the injected pair luminosity, L . RIGHT: Number rate of emerging pairs as functions of L (solid line). The case where gravity has been neglected is shown by the dashed line.
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Fig. 2. LEFT: The energy spectrum of emerging photons for dierent values of L , as marked on the curves. The dashed line is the spectrum of blackbody emission. RIGHT: The mean energy of the emerging photons (thick solid line) and electrons (thin solid line) as a function of L . For comparison, we show as the dotted line the mean energy of blackbody photons for the same energy density as that of the photons at the photosphere. Also shown as the dashed line is the mean energy of the emerging photons in the case when only two particle processes are taken into account.

Acknowledgments The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. References
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. A.G. A.G. A.G. V.V. V.V. Aksenov, M. Milgrom and V.V. Usov, Mon. Not. RAS 343, L69 (2003). Aksenov, M. Milgrom and V.V. Usov, Astrophys. J. 609, 363 (2004). Aksenov, M. Milgrom and V.V. Usov, Astrophys. J. 623, 567 (2005). Usov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 230 (1998). Usov, Astrophys. J. Lett. 550, L179 (2001).