Neutron stars, whether isolated or in a binary system, display a varied and complex phenomenology, often accompanied by extreme variability of many time scales, which takes the form of pulsations due to the object rotation, quasi-periodicities associated to accretion of matter, and explosions due to matter accreted on the surface or to starquakes of highly magnetized objects.
This book gives an overview of the current observational and theoretical standpoint in the research on the physics under the extreme conditions that neutron stars naturally provide. The six chapters explore three physical regions of a neutron star:
- the space around it, where accretion and pulsar companions allow testing of general relativity
- its surface, where millisecond pulsation and X-ray burts provide clues about general relativistic effects and the equation of state of neutron matter
- its interior, of course, inaccessible to direct observations, can nevertheless, be probed with all observational parameters related to neutron star variability.
Tomaso M. Belloni studied physics at the University of Milan and graduated in 1986 with a thesis on a black-hole binary. He worked at the Max-Planck Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (Germany) and at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Since 1999 he is at INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Merate, Italy, currently as a Senior Scientist. He was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton, UK in the years 2012-2013 and is Visiting Professor there since then. He is currently chairman of subcommission E1 of COSPAR and editor for New Astronomy. His interests are in accreting X-ray binaries and time series analysis.
Mariano Méndez completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of La Plata, Argentina, in 1989. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of La Plata and the University of Amsterdam, and was a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPA) in Munich. He was assistant and associate professor at the University of La Plata, honorary associate professor at the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), and is currently full professor at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands and visiting professor at the University of Southampton in the UK. From 2001 to 2007 he was PI of the Low-Energy Transmission Grating (LETG) spectrometer on board the Chandra X-ray observatory, and since 2015 is science co-I of the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) that will be part of the Athena X-ray Observatory. He was associate editor of Space Research Today, and is currently member of the board of directors of the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and chair of COSPAR’s Panel on Capacity Building. He organised about 30 capacity-building workshops on space science in countries in Africa, Asia, East Europe and Latin-America, and in 2018 he received the COSPAR Distinguished Service Medal for his contributionto the advancement of space sciences in developing countries.
Chengmin Zhang received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics at The University of Hong Kong (China), on the topics of magnetic field and spin period evolutions of accreting neutron stars in binary systems and formations of millisecond pulsars. He had the positions for the research fellowships at IFT/UNESP (Brazil) on gravitational field and relativistic astrophysics and at Theoretical Astrophysics Institue of Sydney University (Australia) on pulsar astrophysics and radio scintillation. He is now a reaserch professor at CAS Key Lab of FAST, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a teaching professor at The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
