Testing consistency of deconfinement heating of strange stars in superbursters and soft X-ray transients

Abstract

Both superbursters and soft X-ray transients probe the thermal structure of the crust on compact stars and are sensitive to the process of deep crustal heating. It was recently shown that the transfer of matter from crust to core in a strange star can heat the crust by deconfinement and ignite superbursts provided certain constraints on the strange quark matter equation of state are fulfilled. Corresponding constraints are derived for soft X-ray transients in a simple parameterized model assuming their quiescent emission is powered in the same way, and the time dependence of this heating mechanism in transient systems is discussed.