MG11 
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Pair winds in Schwarzschild spacetime with application to strange stars

A stationary, spherically outflowing wind consisting of electron-positron pairs and photons is considered. We do not assume thermal equilibrium, and include the two-body processes that occur in such a wind: Moller and Bhaba scattering of pairs, Compton scattering, two-photon pair annihilation, and two-photon pair production, together with their radiative three-body variants: bremsstrahlung, double Compton scattering, and three-photon pair annihilation, with their inverse processes. We solve the general relativistic kinetic Boltzmann equations for pairs and photons at moderate luminosities. At large luminosities we consider the hydrodynamical approximation. We apply this to the concrete example of a wind from a hot, bare, strange star, predicted to be a powerful source of hard X-ray photons and pairs created by the Coulomb barrier at the quark surface. We find that photons dominate in the emerging emission, and the emerging photon spectrum is rather hard and differs substantially from the thermal spectrum expected from a neutron star with the same luminosity. This might help distinguish the putative bare strange stars from neutron stars.