2017/04/20 by Christodoulou, D. M., Laycock, S. G. T., Kazanas, D.
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.06364
We have compiled a comprehensive library of all X-ray observations of Magellanic pulsars carried out by \it XMM-Newton, \it Chandra, and \it RXTE in the period 1997-2014. In this work, we use the data from 53 high-mass Be/X-ray binaries in the Small Magellanic Cloud to demonstrate that the distribution of spin-period derivatives vs. spin periods of spinning-down pulsars is not at all different than that of the accreting spinning-up pulsars. The inescapable conclusion is that the up and down samples were drawn from the same continuous parent population, therefore Be/X-ray pulsars that are spinning down over periods spanning 18 years are in fact accreting from retrograde disks. The presence of prograde and retrograde disks in roughly equal numbers supports a new evolutionary scenario for Be/X-ray pulsars in their spin period-period derivative diagram.