Unexpected late-time temperature increase observed in two neutron star crust cooling sources -- XTE~J1701-462 and EXO~0748-676

TL;DR

This paper reports an unexpected late-time temperature increase in two neutron star crust cooling sources, challenging existing cooling models and suggesting new physics or processes in neutron star crusts.

Contribution

It presents the first observation of a late-time temperature rise in neutron star crusts, which cannot be explained by current cooling or accretion models.

Findings

Observed steep temperature decay (~7 eV) around 2000 days post-outburst

Detected a significant temperature rise (~3 eV) after the decay

The behavior is inconsistent with existing cooling models and low-level accretion explanations

Abstract

Transient LMXBs that host neutron stars (NSs) provide excellent laboratories for probing the dense matter physics present in NS crusts. During accretion outbursts in LMXBs, exothermic reactions may heat the NS crust, disrupting the crust-core equilibrium. When the outburst ceases, the crust cools to restore thermal equilibrium with the core. Monitoring this evolution allows us to probe the dense matter physics in the crust. Properties of the deeper crustal layers can be probed at later times after the end of the outburst. We report on the unexpected late-time temperature evolution (>2000 days after the end of their outbursts) of two NSs in LMXBs, XTE J1701-462 and EXO 0748-676. Although both these sources exhibited very different outbursts (in terms of duration and the average accretion rate), they exhibit an unusually steep decay of ~7 eV in the observed effective temperature (occurring in a time span of ~700 days) around ~2000 days after the end of their outbursts. Furthermore, they both showed an even more unexpected rise of ~3 eV in temperature (over a time period of ~500-2000 days) after this steep decay. This rise was significant at the 2.4{\sigma} and 8.5{\sigma} level for XTE J1701-462 and EXO 0748-676, respectively. The physical explanation for such behaviour is unknown and cannot be straightforwardly be explained within the cooling hypothesis. In addition, this observed evolution cannot be well explained by low-level accretion either without invoking many assumptions. We investigate the potential pathways in the theoretical heating and cooling models that could reproduce this unusual behaviour, which so far has been observed in two crust-cooling sources. Such a temperature increase has not been observed in the other NS crust-cooling sources at similarly late times, although it cannot be excluded that this might be a result of the inadequate sampling obtained at such late times.