Published 2024-01-01
“…The implications of our study are as follows: (a) apparently, accretion torques have had time to erase spin–orbit misalignment caused by supernova kicks in two-thirds of the systems; (b) many X-ray binary pulsars have dominant dipolar surface magnetic fields, in contrast to the recently reported exotic configurations in millisecond pulsars; and (c) if the binary inclinations can be determined by pulse-profile modeling, even for a subset of the ∼200 known X-ray binary pulsars, most of which orbital inclinations are as yet poorly constrained, it raises the prospect of tightening dramatically ongoing
neutron-star mass determinations. This is because masses in binary systems overwhelmingly come from an orbital-mechanics formulation (Kepler’s third law), in which the dominant source of uncertainty is the inclination of the orbital plane.…”
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