A NICER View of the Massive Pulsar PSR J0740+6620 Informed by Radio Timing and XMM-Newton Spectroscopy

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Abstract We report on Bayesian estimation of the radius, mass, and hot surface regions of the massive millisecond pulsar PSR J0740+6620, conditional on pulse-profile modeling of Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer X-ray Timing Instrument event data. All software for the X-ray modeling framework is open-source and all data, model, and sample information is publicly available, including analysis notebooks and model modules in the Python language.

🔑 Key Findings

• We condition on informative pulsar mass, distance, and orbital inclination priors derived from the joint North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves and Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment/Pulsar wideband radio timing measurements of Fonseca and colleagues
• We use XMM-Newton European Photon Imaging Camera spectroscopic event data to inform our X-ray likelihood function.
• The prior support of the pulsar radius is truncated at 16 km to ensure coverage of current dense matter models.

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