DIRECT OBSERVATION OF THE COOLING OF THE CASSIOPEIA A NEUTRON STAR
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cooling rate of young neutron stars (NSs) gives direct insight into their internal makeup. Although the temperatures of several young NSs have been measured, until now a young NS has never been observed to decrease in temperature over time. We fit nine years of archival Chandra ACIS spectra of the likely NS in the ∼330 yr old Cassiopeia A supernova remnant with our non-magnetic carbon atmosphere model. Our fits show a relative decline in the surface temperature by 4% (5.4σ, from (2.12 ± 0.01) × 10 6 K in 2000 to (2.04 ± 0.01) × 10 6 K in 2009) and the observed flux by 21%. Using a simple model for NS cooling, we show that this temperature decline could indicate that the NS became isothermal sometime between 1965 and 1980, and constrains some combinations of neutrino emission mechanisms and envelope compositions. However, the NS is likely to have become isothermal soon after formation, in which case the temperature history suggests episodes of additional heating or more rapid cooling. Observations over the next few years will allow us to test possible explanations for the temperature evolution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".