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Session 50 - Pulsars in the UV and Visible.
Topical, Oral session, Wednesday, June 10
Friars,
Pulsed emission at X-ray energies has been detected from a number of pulsars. The bulk of these detections were made by ROSAT in the soft 0.1 - 2 keV band, where the emission appears to be a thermal blackbody, due either to neutron star cooling and /or heating of the polar cap by returning particle flux. Recently, detections of a handful of pulsars by ASCA and RXTE have revealed that the emission is very different in the hard X-ray band, 1 - 30 keV, where it appears to have a non-thermal, power law spectrum. In some cases like Vela, the hard X-ray emission is a smooth extension of the gamma-ray spectrum seen at higher energies, but in other cases like Geminga, the connection to higher energies is not clear. I will discuss some new results in both observations and models of pulsar X-ray emission, the connection to the UV and optical emission, and what it tells us about the site of particle acceleration and radiation.
