Teresa Panurach
Naval Research Laboratory
Characterizing the Radio Properties of Accreting Neutron Stars
Neutron star X-ray binaries are systems in which a neutron star is accreting mass from a stellar or degenerate companion. Accreting neutron star X-ray binaries can show outflows-and sometimes jets-in the general manner of accreting black holes. However, the quantitative link between the accretion flow (traced by X-rays) and outflows and/or jets (traced by radio emission) is much less well understood for neutron stars than for black holes. In this talk, I will review our current understanding of neutron star X-ray binaries and discuss our analysis of accreting neutron stars in a broad range of environments using radio observations from NRAO’s Very Large Array and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Our results show that neutron stars do not follow a single relation between inflow and outflow and confirm that their accretion dynamics are more complex than for black holes.