Superbursting

Last summer's featured creature was Caspar Weinberger's secret (and secretly recorded) speech. He spelled out why his administration is so fully committed to a superbursting armageddon program.

... how observations of quasi-persistent transient neutron stars probe the equation of state of dense matter; and how these observations compare with complimentary studies of quasi-persistent transients and superbursting neutron stars.

By fitting improved cooling models, we measure for the first time the radial temperature profile of the superbursting layer.

While most superbursting sources are observed to accrete continuously at a high rate, around 10% of the Eddington limit, a number of recent observations clearly at odds with thermonuclear ignition models have challenged the standard scenario.