Gamma-ray bursts from rapidly spinning neutron stars

A neutron star in an X-ray binary (XRB) is spun up by mass transfer from its companion to rotation periods of the order of a millisecond. Evidence for this are the existence of ms pulsars, believed to descend from X-ray binaries. Direct evidence of such rotation rates in XRB is the of 2.5 ms rotation in SAX 1808. The rotation energy in a neutron star spinning at 1 ms is 10(52) erg, in the range of that required for GRB. The environment also satisfies the baryon loading constraint, since the accretion disk contains only of the order 10(-9)M., and the companion star blocks only of the order 1% of the sky as seen from the neutron star.