Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics

Propeller effect in X-ray pulsars

Sergey Tsygankov (University of Turku)
11.07.2016

Propeller effect, i.e. centrifugal inhibition of accretion, is an immediate evidence of the presence of a strong dipole magnetic field in accreting neutron stars. Observation of this effect requires high sensitivity of X-ray telescopes and become possible only recently. From the theoretical point of view many aspects of this effect (spectrum formation, matter leakage through the centrifugal barrier, etc) are still not developed due to the lack of a high quality observational data.
In this talk I will review observational manifestations of the propeller effect in X-ray pulsars with broad range of the magnetic fields from 10^8 to 10^14 G.