Reheated Sub-40000 Kelvin Neutron Stars at the JWST, ELT, and TMT

Understand

Neutron stars cooling passively since their birth may be reheated in their late-stage evolution by a number of possible phenomena: rotochemical, vortex creep, crust cracking, magnetic field decay, or more exotic processes such as removal of neutrons from their Fermi seas (the nucleon Auger effect), baryon number-violating nucleon decay, and accretion of particle dark matter.

• Using Exposure Time Calculator tools, we show that reheating mechanisms imparting effective temperatures of 2000--40000 Kelvin may be uncovered with excellent sensitivities at the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), with imaging instruments operating from visible-edge to near-infrared.
• With a day of exposure, they could constrain the reheating luminosity of a neutron star up to a distance of 500 pc, within which about $10^5$ (undiscovered) neutron stars lie.
• Detection in multiple filters could overconstrain a neutron star's surface temperature, distance from Earth, mass, and radius.