Accreting-pulsar luminosity and material-torque consistency Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
If both luminosity and spin-up torque are supplied by the same steady mass inflow, and imply . A model requiring cannot describe an exterior magnetosphere. Beaming, opposing magnetic torque, outflows and a different radiative efficiency change this inference and must be made explicit.
The accreting-pulsar luminosity and material-torque consistency test shows a concrete tension between the simplest isotropic luminosity estimate and the material-torque estimate. Making their rates equal requires
An exterior accretion Alfvén radius cannot lie inside a 10-km star. Even taking its smallest exterior value, , the observed torque permits only about in this model, below the isotropic estimate. The discrepancy is modest enough to be sensitive to the approximate radius and moment of inertia, but it prevents claiming exact simultaneous agreement under the stated central values.
Near corotation, the torque gives only . If its radiative efficiency is unchanged, beaming into a fraction about of the sky would reconcile that intrinsic luminosity with the apparent isotropic value. The given truncation formula would then require T for a magnetosphere near corotation. Other possibilities include substantial opposing magnetic torque, outflows separating the disk supply rate from the surface rate, a different radiative efficiency and magnetically altered opacity. These are changes to the elementary model that need independent evidence, rather than a license to use an unphysical truncation radius. Coherent pulsations already identify the accretor as a neutron star; they do not by themselves choose between these accretion-flow refinements.
Radiative efficiency Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-11-05
The radiative efficiency is the escaping radiative power divided by an adopted accreted rest-mass energy rate. Its meaning depends on where the mass rate is measured and which emission is counted. For efficient Newtonian accretion onto a stellar surface it scales as , whereas advection or outflows can reduce luminosity for the same supplied mass.