The excellent sensitivity of X-ray telescopes, such as Chandra and XMM-Newton, is ideal for the study of cooling neutron stars, which can emit at these energies. In order to exploit the wealth of information contained in the high quality data, a thorough knowledge of the radiative properties of neutron star atmospheres is necessary. A key factor affecting photon emission is magnetic fields, and neutron stars are known to have strong surface magnetic fields. Here I briefly describe our latest work on constructing magnetic (B >= 10^10 G) atmosphere models of neutron stars and the NSMAXG implementation of these models in XSPEC. Our results allow for more robust extractions of neutron star parameters from observations.
Categories: astro-ph.HE astro-ph.SR