Accretion-powered Millisecond Pulsar Outbursts

Abstract

The population of accretion-powered millisecond pulsars has grown rapidly over the last four years, with the discovery of six new examples to bring the total sample to seven. While the first six discovered are transients active for a few weeks every two or more years, the most recently-discovered source HETE J1900.1-2455, has been active for more than 8 months. We summarise the transient behaviour of the population to estimate long-term time-averaged fluxes, and equate these fluxes to the expected mass transfer rate driven by gravitational radiation in order to constrain the distances. We also estimate an upper limit of 6 kpc to the distance of IGR J00291+5934 based on the non-detection of bursts from this source.