Multiwavelength Analysis of PSR J0437-4715 with Pulse Profile Modeling

We present a multiwavelength analysis of the nearby millisecond pulsar PSR J0437–4715, combining Hubble Space Telescope (HST) far-ultraviolet, ROSAT soft X-ray, and XMM-Newton X-ray data, to model its broadband emission and energy-resolved pulse profiles and infer key stellar parameters via Bayesian inference. The broadband emission includes cold thermal, hot thermal, and nonthermal components: cold bulk surface emission is modeled with a nonmagnetized partially ionized hydrogen atmosphere; hot-spot emission adopts the pulse profile modeling technique with a nonmagnetized fully ionized hydrogen atmosphere model; and nonthermal emission is included as a phase-invariant power-law component. By adopting an informative prior on the hot-spot geometry informed by radio polarization position angle measurements, the joint multi-instrument analysis yields a statistically viable and radio-consistent solution with a gravitational mass of 1.38 ± 0.03 M ⊙ and an equatorial circumferential radius of 13.25 − 0.35 + 0.34 km (68% confidence intervals). The hot-spot geometry consists of two spherical caps with uniform temperature distributions: the primary hot spot is situated at a colatitude of ≈130°, and the secondary hot spot lies at a colatitude of ≈9°, close to the north pole. It yields tighter radius constraints than HST+ROSAT fits and shifts the radius posterior distribution to larger values relative to NICER-only fits. This work demonstrates the importance of multiwavelength data in refining neutron star mass–radius measurements and resolving geometric degeneracies.