On the Cooling of Compact Stars in Light of the HESS J1731-347 Remnant

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermal evolution and structural properties of the compact object in HESS J1731-347, exploring hadronic, hybrid, and quark star models to explain observed temperature, mass, and radius.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of different star compositions, showing that hybrid and strange stars can fit observational data if quark matter is superconducting and certain processes are suppressed.

Findings

Hadronic stars can explain temperature and age without pairing effects.

Hybrid stars require superconducting quark cores to match observations.

Strange stars can reconcile cooling constraints with superconducting quark matter.

Abstract

Recent analyses on the central compact object in the HESS J1731-347 supernova remnant reported not only surprising structural properties (mass $M$ and radius $R$), but also an interesting thermal evolution. More precisely, it has been estimated that $M=0.77^{+0.20}_{-0.17}M_\odot$ and $R=10.4^{+0.86}_{-0.78}$ km (at the $1\sigma$ level), while a redshited surface temperature of $153^{+4}_ {-2}$ keV at an age of 2-6 kyrs has been reported. In the present work, we conduct an in-depth investigation on the possible nature (hadronic, hybrid, quark) of this compact object by attempting to not only explain its mass and radius but also the corresponding estimations for its temperature and age. In the case of hybrid stars we also examine possible effects of the symmetry energy on the activation of different neutrino emitting process, and hence on the resulting cooling curves. We found that the reported temperature and age may be compatible to hadronic stellar configurations regardless of whether pairing effects are included. In the scenario of hybrid stars, we found that the strange quark matter core has to be in a superconducting state in order to reach an agreement with the observational constraints. In addition, the hadronic phase must be soft enough so that the direct Urca process is not activated. Furthermore, we have shown that the considered cooling constraints can be reconciled within the framework of strange stars. However, quark matter has to be in a superconducting state and the quark direct Urca process needs to be blocked.