1999/07/13 by R. X. Xu, Renxin Xu, G. J. Qiao +3 · 3 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Geophysics and Sensor Technology #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/312226
4 pages, no figures, LaTeX, accepted 1999 July 9 by ApJ Letters
arxiv created 1999/07/13 · openalex publication_date 1999/09/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Recent work by Rankin & Deshpande strongly suggests that there exist strong "microstorms" rotating around the magnetic axis of the 1.1 s pulsar PSR 0943+10. Such a feature hints that most probably the large-voltage vacuum gap proposed by Ruderman & Sutherland (RS) does exist in the pulsar polar cap. However, there are severe arguments against the formation of the RS-type gap in pulsars, since the binding energies of both the 56 Fe ions and the electrons in a neutron star's surface layer are too small to prevent thermionic ejection of the particles from the surface. Here we propose that PSR 0943+10 (and probably also all of the other "drifting" pulsars) might be bare strange stars rather than normal neutron stars, in which the "binding energy" at the surface is merely infinity for the case of either a "pulsar" or an "antipulsar." It is further proposed that identifying a drifting pulsar as an antipulsar is the key criterion for distinguishing strange stars from neutron stars.