A comparative study of binary synthesis modelling software for neutron star mass estimates

Kennelly, Sorcha Riain

A comparative study of binary synthesis modelling software for neutron star mass estimates

dc.contributor.advisor	Kennedy, Mark
dc.contributor.author	Kennelly, Sorcha Riain	en
dc.date.accessioned	2025-10-06T15:10:19Z
dc.date.available	2025-10-06T15:10:19Z
dc.date.issued	2025
dc.date.submitted	2025
dc.description.abstract	Binary star systems known as spiders consist of a millisecond pulsar ablating or accreting from its main sequence companion star. The pulsars in these systems are known for being quite massive and, as such, are useful in the effort to constrain the equation of state for nuclear matter. Accurate mass measurements of the neutron star in these systems are vital to the field, and are made using bespoke modelling software that simulate the system and generate model light curves. Through fitting these simulated curves to data, accurate estimates for the mass can be made. For years, various codes have been used independently but recently, a question about whether these codes will predict the same systemic parameters was raised. Here, we present the answer to this question in the context of the two most common spider modelling codes, Phoebe and Icarus, following the first ever comparison between them. We find that the codes behave quite similarly, as is expected, though there are some differences in how the surface gravity of the companion star is handled, which has some effects on the temperature predictions. We further explored whether the codes converge to the same conclusions when fitting data by considering the system LAMOST J112306.9+400736 using various constraints and comparing to a previous study by Yi et al. (2022) which used Phoebe. We find that both codes predict similar parameters, though there were some significant differences in the time required to fit a model and in how constrained a model needed to be. The ultimate choice between codes is personal to each researcher and neither choice will lead to less trustworthy results.	en
dc.description.status	Not peer reviewed	en
dc.description.version	Accepted Version	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	Kennelly, S. R. 2025. A comparative study of binary synthesis modelling software for neutron star mass estimates. MSc Thesis, University College Cork.
dc.identifier.endpage	80
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10468/17965
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.publisher	University College Cork	en
dc.rights	© 2025, Sorcha Riain Kennelly.
dc.rights.uri	https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
dc.subject	Binary modelling codes
dc.subject	Neutron star mass estimates
dc.subject	Pulsars
dc.subject	Spider binaries
dc.title	A comparative study of binary synthesis modelling software for neutron star mass estimates	en
dc.type	Masters thesis (Research)	en
dc.type.qualificationlevel	Masters	en
dc.type.qualificationname	MSc - Master of Science	en