A 'Strong' Case for the Importance of Gravitational Bending of Light Around Neutron Stars

Gravitational light bending can produce strong general relativistic ‘lensing’ effects due to photon propagation around compact stars. Pulsar light beams get modified due to ray bending in the curved space-time around the neutron star. The work incorporates advances in the theory of light bending to compute corrected updates to binary accreting X-ray pulsar profiles at a high spin phase resolution. Additional flux received from the unseen face of the neutron star is also modeled. There are major changes in the beamed observables; these are in agreement with earlier attempts in this direction. X-ray Einstein rings are seen as a limiting possibility.