Towards an X-ray inventory of nearby neutron stars

Understand

The X-ray emission of neutron stars enables a probe of their temperatures, geometries, and magnetospheric properties.

• The current number of X-ray emitting pulsars is insufficient to rule out observational biases that may arise from poorly known distance, age, or location of the neutron stars.
• One approach to overcome such biases is to create a distance-limited sample with sufficiently deep observations.
• With the aim of better sampling of the nearby ($\lesssim$ 2kpc) neutron stars population, we started an XMM-Newton survey of pulsars to measure their X-ray fluxes or derive respective constraining upper limits.