Key Information

• Authors: Hong-Bo Li, Shi-Jie Gao, Xiang-Dong Li, Ren-Xin Xu
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Year: 2026
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag241
• NASA ADS: 2026MNRAS.546ag241L
• arXiv: 2509.13732

Abstract

Ultraluminous X-ray pulsars (ULXPs) serve as unique astrophysical laboratories, offering critical insights into accretion physics under extreme conditions, such as strong magnetic fields and super-Eddington accretion rates. Additionally, the nature of pulsars, i.e. the equation of state of supranuclear matter, is still a matter of intense debate, basing on either conventional neutron stars or strange stars. In this work, in order to differentiate the conjectured states of matter, we investigate accretion columns of ULXPs based on the strangeon-star (SS) model, focusing on the thermal mound at the column base. Accounting for Coulomb and strangeness barriers of SSs, we find that the mound can reach $0.7\text{-}0.95\, \rm km$ in height with temperatures above $10^9\, \rm K$, enabling substantial neutrino emission via electron─positron annihilation. At low-accretion rates (${\lt} 10^{20}\, \rm g\, s^{-1}$), photons dominate the luminosity, while at higher rates (${\gt} 10^{21}\, \rm g\, s^{-1}$), photon trapping makes neutrino emission the main cooling channel, with total luminosity exceeding photon emission, which saturates near $10^{41}\, \rm erg\, s^{-1}$. Even though the predicted neutrino flux from the nearest system, Swift J0243.6$+$6124, lies well below the diffuse MeV background ─ implying that detectable emission would require substantially closer or more luminous sources ─ these results demonstrate the key role of the thermal mound and SS properties in accretion, providing a foundation for future ULXP studies and suggesting that neutrino observations could, in principle, offer a novel probe of SSs and extreme supranuclear matter.