The Slow Orbital Evolution of the Accreting Millisecond Pulsar IGR J0029+5934

TL;DR

This study measures the orbital period change of the accreting millisecond pulsar IGR J0029+5934, finding it evolves very slowly, unlike its twin system, which has implications for understanding pulsar wind efficiency and mass transfer mechanisms.

Contribution

First measurement of the orbital period derivative of IGR J0029+5934, providing constraints on its orbital evolution timescale and comparing it with similar systems.

Findings

Orbital evolution timescale > 0.5 Gyr, consistent with gravitational radiation-driven mass transfer.

IGR J0029+5934 shows much slower orbital evolution than SAX J1808.4-3658.

Low efficiency (<5%) of spin-down power conversion needed to explain observations.

Abstract

The accreting millisecond pulsars IGR J00291+5934 and SAX J1808.4-3658 are two compact binaries with very similar orbital parameters. The latter has been observed to evolve on a very short timescale of ~70 Myr which is more than an order of magnitude shorter than expected. There is an ongoing debate on the possibility that the pulsar spin-down power ablates the companion generating large amount of mass-loss in the system. It is interesting therefore to study whether IGR J00291+5934 does show a similar behaviour as its twin system SAX J1808.4-3658. In this work we present the first measurement of the orbital period derivative of IGR J00291+5934. By using XMM-Newton data recorded during the 2015 outburst and adding the previous results of the 2004 and 2008 outbursts, we are able to measure a 90% confidence level upper limit for the orbital period derivative of -5x10^-13<Pb_dot<6x10^-13. This implies that the binary is evolving on a timescale longer than ~0.5 Gyr, which is compatible with the expected timescale of mass transfer driven by angular momentum loss via gravitational radiation. We discuss the scenario in which the power loss from magnetic dipole radiation of the neutron star is hitting the companion star. If this model is applied to SAX J1808.4-3658 then the difference in orbital behavior can be ascribed to a different efficiency for the conversion of the spin-down power into energetic relativistic pulsar wind and X-ray/gamma-ray radiation for the two pulsars, with IGR J00291+5934 requiring an extraordinarily low efficiency of less than 5% to explain the observations. Alternatively, the donor in IGR J00291+5934 is weakly/not magnetized which would suppress the possibility of generating mass-quadrupole variations.