On burning regimes and long duration X-ray bursts

Hydrogen and helium accreted onto a neutron star undergo thermonuclear burning. Explosive burning is observed as a type I X-ray burst. We describe the different burning regimes and focus on some of the current inconsistencies between theory and observations. Of special interest are the rare kinds of X-ray bursts such as carbon-fueled superbursts and helium-fueled intermediately long X-ray bursts. These bursts are thought to originate deeper in the neutron star envelope, such that they are probes of the thermal properties of the crust. We investigate the possibility of observing superbursts with the wide-field instruments INTEGRAL-ISGRI and Swift-BAT. We find that only the brightest bursts are detectable.
Comment: Contributed talk to appear in the proceedings of the "7th INTEGRAL Workshop - An INTEGRAL View of Compact Objects", Copenhagen, Denmark, on 8-11 September 2008