English

A self-consistent model of shock-heated plasma in non-equilibrium states for direct parameter constraints from X-ray observations

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-10-02 v1

Abstract

X-ray observations of shock-heated plasmas, such as those found in supernova remnants, often exhibit features of temperature and ionization non-equilibrium. For accurate interpretation of these observations, proper calculations of the equilibration processes are essential. Here, we present a self-consistent model of thermal X-ray emission from shock-heated plasmas that accounts for both temperature and ionization non-equilibrium conditions. For a given pair of shock velocity and initial electron-to-ion temperature ratio, the temporal evolution of the temperature and ionization state of each element was calculated by simultaneously solving the relaxation processes of temperature and ionization. The resulting thermal X-ray spectrum was synthesized by combining our model with the AtomDB spectral code. Comparison between our model and the \texttt{nei} model, a constant-temperature non-equilibrium ionization model available in the XSPEC software package, reveals a 30\% underestimation of the ionization timescale in the \texttt{nei} model. We implemented our model in XSPEC to directly constrain the shock wave properties, such as the shock velocity and collisionless electron heating efficiency, from the thermal X-ray emission from postshock plasmas. We applied this model to archival Chandra data of the supernova remnant N132D, providing a constraint on the shock velocity of 800 kms1\sim 800~\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}}, in agreement with previous optical studies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.00420,
  title  = {A self-consistent model of shock-heated plasma in non-equilibrium states for direct parameter constraints from X-ray observations},
  author = {Yuken Ohshiro and Shunsuke Suzuki and Yoshizumi Okada and Hiromasa Suzuki and Hiroya Yamaguchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.00420},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

17 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ