research

General Relativistic Spectra from Accretion Disks around Rapidly Rotating Neutron Stars

Abstract

We compute spectra from accretion disks around rapidly rotating neutron stars. The full effect of general relativity is considered for the structure calculation of the stars. We take into account the Doppler shift, gravitational redshift and light-bending effects in order to compute the observed spectra. To facilitate direct comparison with observations, a simple empirical function is presented which describes the numerically computed spectra well. This function can in principle be used to distinguish between the Newtonian spectra and the relativistic spectra. We also discuss the possibility of constraining neutron star's equation of state using our spectral models.Comment: 2 pages, to appear in the proceedings of 'The Physics of Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects', Goettingen, August 5-10, 200

    Similar works