Announcing the NS-Capture Empirical Spin-up Process

A new page has been added to the Secret of the Pulsars website that describes the NS-Capture Empirical Spin-up Process and shows how it provides additional support that NS-Capture is the only plausible mechanism to explain the data collected in the last 50 years on both spinning-down radio pulsars and spinning-up x-ray pulsars.

The “additional support” came as a bit of a surprise as I was reviewing a paper that had been reviewed on astrobites.com by Matthew Green, with the curious title of “Backwards Discs around Be X-ray Binaries“. The surprise was the realization that the paper contained spin-up and spin-down rates of Be X-ray binaries that show the pulsars in that environment have very strong magnetic fields, especially compared to the magnetic fields of spinning-down radio pulsars such as the Crab.

The significance of this observational fact is that it means the magnetic fields in the Be X-ray binary neutron stars are stronger than the magnetic fields of their supposed progenitors that are typified by the spinning-down pulsars in the island of the conventional P/P-dot diagram. This raises the question: How did the magnetic field of the neutron star gain strength compared to the magnetic field it supposedly inherited from its birth as a simple remnant of a supernova explosion that supposedly created it, as is required by conventional NS-Creation theory (as this site refers to the theory that claims neutron stars are created by supernova explosions (NS-Capture theory claims the opposite: neutron stars are captured by regular stars and are spun up and in the process the capturing star explodes in a supernova leaving the spun-up neutron star behind.)).

The original claims of NS-Capture theory are based primarily around the contradiction that creating a fast pulsar in a binary system leaves it in an environment where it cannot slow down, and therefore we must seek a different origin of the slow-spinning up neutron star found in x-ray binary systems. That “other origin” must be that the neutron star pre-existed in space and was introduced to form a binary by being captured by its companion.

The new page describes the overall spin-up process in empirical terms and shows how the diagrammatic proof of NS-Capture complements the NS-Capture explanation of the P/P-dot diagram.