The Lives of the Neutron Stars

This NATO AS! was the third in the series of Advanced Study Institutes on neutron stars, which started with 'Timing Neutron Stars', held in Qe§me near izmir, Turkey (April 1988), followed by 'Neutron Stars, an Interdis­ ciplinary Subject', held in Agia Pelagia on the island of Crete (September 1990). The first school centered on our main observational access to neu­ tron stars, i. e. the timing of radio pulsars and accretion powered neutron stars, and on what timing of neutron stars teaches us of their structure and environment. The second school had as its theme the interplay between diverse areas of physics which find interesting, even exotic applications in the extreme conditions of neutron stars and their magnetospheres. As the field has developed, with the number of observed neutron stars rapidly in­ creasing, and our knowledge of many individual neutron stars getting deeper and more detailed, an evolutionary picture of neutron stars has started to emerge. This led us to choose 'The Lives of the Neutron Stars' as the uni­ fying theme of this third Advanced Study Institute on neutron stars. Different types of neutron star activity have been proposed to follow one another in stages during the lives of neutron stars in the same basic population; the evolutionary connection between low-mass X-ray binaries and millisecond radio pulsars is perhaps the prime example.