HETE J1900.1-2455 is a neutron star that swallows material from a small companion star that a mass of only about 10% of our Sun. It was discovered in 2006 with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and exhibits some exceptional properties.

Firstly, HETE J1900.1-2455 showed pulses of X-rays every 2.65 millisecond. This shows that the magnetic field of the neutron star is channeling plasma to its magnetic poles which are then heated and lighting up in X-rays. As the neutron star rotates around its own axis a dazzling 377 times per second, this bundle of X-rays sweeps across our line of sight like a light house. Approximately 10% of all neutron stars with low-mass companions show such X-ray pulsations. Secondly, unlike most neutron stars that are eating for only a few weeks at a time, HETE J1900.1-2455 continued to be active for over a decade. Until 2015…

In 2015 November, HETE J1900.1-2455 suddenly dropped off the radar of the Japanese X-ray detector MAXI, which is mounted on the International Space Station and continuously scans the X-ray sky. The sudden drop of X-ray emission indicated that this neutron star had finally stopped eating. To test this, we observed this neutron star with two X-ray satellites that are more sensitive than MAXI and can thus detected much fainter X-ray light, Chandra and Swift. Our observations were carried out a few months after it had disappeared from the daily MAXI scans.

We found that the neutron star had indeed peacefully gone back to sleep. The X-rays observed during quiescent episodes are usually due to heat that radiated by the neutron star. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that HETE J1900.1-2455 was much colder, about 600 000 degrees Celsius, than we typically see for neutron stars after they have been active for many years (>1 million degrees Celsius). The reason that neutron stars are so hot after long meals is because consuming gas generates energy that heats their interior.

The fact that our temperature measurement of HETE J1900.1-2455 was so low, despite 10 years of activity, places exciting constraints on its interior properties. In particular, it requires that the central, liquid part of the neutron star is strongly superfluid. A superfluid is very peculiar liquid that has zero viscosity and freely moves without experiencing any friction. In laboratory experiments on Earth, liquid helium can be made superfluid when it is cooled down to nearly zero temperature. It is quite amazing that in neutron stars superfluidity can be achieved at temperatures of nearly a million degrees Celsius.

The constraints on the intriguing interior properties of HETE J1900.1-2455 will become even stronger if the neutron star cools further down now that it has stopped eating. We therefore plan further temperature measurements of this neutron star in the future.

Degenaar, Ootes, Renolds, Wijnands, Page 2017, MNRAS Letters 465, L10: A cold neutron star in the transient low-mass X-ray binary HETE J1900.1-2455 after 10 yr of active accretion

Paper link: ADS

Schematic representation of the structure of a neutron star.