A strangely light neutron star within a supernova remnant
And another Nature astronomy paper, this time without
a large collaboration. In fact, it comes in the same volume as the Her X-1
paper, which might be the first case when someone published two first author
papers in the single volume of Nature astronomy :) The essense of the paper is
summarized by the title and figure below
We have basically re-visited the old friend, the CCO in HESS J1731-347 in order to use all available constraints on spectrum and distance to the source and improve estimates of mass and radius of the neutron star. Which turned out to be, well... strangely light! It might be the lightest neutron star known, in fact. Or even some more exotic object! The paper attracted quite a bit of press-coverage including press release by the Univeristy, getting me some interviews/outreach (New scientist, Sky&Telescope,phys.org and more) and ranking high in Altmetric: