• Revisiting the Evidence for an Intermediate-mass Black Hole in the Center of NGC 6624 with Simulations

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: The acceleration of LMXB 4U 1820-30 that derived from its orbital-period derivative $\dot P_{\rm b}$ was supposed to be the evidence for an Intermediate-mass Black Hole (IMBH) in the Galactic globular cluster (GC) NGC 6624. However, we find that the anomalous $\dot P_{\rm b}$ is mainly due to the gravitational wave emission, rather than the acceleration in cluster potential. Using the standard structure models of GCs, we simulate acceleration distributions for pulsars in the central region of the cluster. By fitting the acceleration of J1823-3021A with the simulated distribution profiles (maximum values), it is suggested that an IMBH with mass $M\gtrsim 950^{+550}_{-350}~M_{\odot}$ may reside in the cluster center. We further show that the second period derivative $\ddot P$ of J1823-3021A is probably due to the gravitational perturbation of a nearby star.

  • Modeling the evolution and distribution of the frequency's second derivative and the braking index of pulsar spin

    分类: 物理学 >> 核物理学 提交时间: 2016-09-13

    摘要: We model the evolution of the spin frequency's second derivative ν¨ and the braking index n of radio pulsars with simulations within the phenomenological model of their surface magnetic field evolution, which contains a long-term power-law decay modulated by short-term oscillations. For the pulsar PSR B0329+54, a model with three oscillation components can reproduce its ν¨ variation. We show that the "averaged" n is different from the instantaneous n, and its oscillation magnitude decreases abruptly as the time span increases, due to the "averaging" effect. The simulated timing residuals agree with the main features of the reported data. Our model predicts that the averaged ν¨ of PSR B0329+54 will start to decrease rapidly with newer data beyond those used in Hobbs et al.. We further perform Monte Carlo simulations for the distribution of the reported data in |ν¨| and |n| versus characteristic age τc diagrams. It is found that the magnetic field oscillation model with decay index α=0 can reproduce the distributions quite well. Compared with magnetic field decay due to the ambipolar diffusion (α=0.5) and the Hall cascade (α=1.0), the model with no long term decay (α=0) is clearly preferred for old pulsars by the p-values of the two-dimensional Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.