Gravitational Redshift for Rapidly Rotating Neutron Stars

TL;DR

This paper identifies small errors in the standard gravitational redshift calculations for rapidly rotating neutron stars using the OS approximation and provides a correction method, ensuring more accurate flux measurements for high-spin pulsars.

Contribution

It introduces a simple correction to the photon redshift calculation in the OS approximation, improving flux accuracy for rapidly rotating neutron stars.

Findings

Flux errors are less than 1% for PSR J0740+6620.

Errors are negligible for most NICER pulsars.

Correction is important for pulsars near 600 Hz.

Abstract

The Oblate Schwarzschild (OS) approximation is a method often used to compute the flux of X-rays emitted from a rapidly rotating neutron star. In this approximation, the oblate shape of the rotating star is embedded in the Schwarzschild metric, which is used to compute the redshift of photon energies as they propagate from the star to the telescope. In this paper, we demonstrate that there are small errors introduced by the standard treatment of photon redshift in the OS approximation and provide a simple method to correct these errors. These errors are constant in phase, so this results in a constant absolute reduction in the flux. For PSR J0740+6620, the most rapidly spinning of the pulsars observed by NICER, we estimate the flux errors are less than 1\%, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the uncertainty in the distance, so this does not affect the mass and radius constraints found for this pulsar. The errors for the other pulsars observed by NICER are even smaller. However, this correction should be included when analyzing data for more rapidly rotating X-ray pulsars with spin frequencies near 600 Hz.