More than seventy years after L. D. Landau's first speculations on the properties of neutron-degenerate objects, we still do not have useful experimental constraints on the most basic property of neutron stars - their mechanical structure and the underlying equation of state. But with the advent of high resolution astrophysical X-ray spectroscopy with the XMM-Newton and Chandra satellite observatories, we can now study the photospheric emission from hot neutron stars in spectroscopic detail. The observation of emission from one object, the neutron star in the binary EXO0748-676, during X-ray bursts, may already have produced the first ever measurement of the gravitational redshift at the surface of a neutron star. I will outline the prospects for measuring the mass and radius of this and other neutron stars using essentially classical atomic stellar spectroscopy.

Page created on May 19, 2008.