Resolution of the Age Discrepancies in Pulsar/SNR Associations
Abstract
Pulsars associated with supernova remnants (SNRs) are valuable because they provide constraints on the mechanism(s) of pulsar spin-down. Here we discuss two SNR/pulsar associations in which the SNR age is much greater than the age of the pulsar obtained by assuming pure magnetic dipole radiation (MDR) spin-down. The PSR B1757-24/SNR G5.4-1.2 association has a minimum age of ~40 kyr from proper motion upper limits, yet the MDR timing age of the pulsar is only 16 kyr, and the newly discovered pulsar PSR J1846-0258 in the >2 kyr old SNR Kes 75 has an MDR timing age of just 0.7 kyr. These and other pulsar/SNR age discrepancies imply that the pulsar spin-down torque is not due to pure MDR, and we discuss a model for the spin-down of the pulsars similar to the ones recently proposed to explain the spin-down of soft gamma-ray repeaters and anomalous x-ray pulsars.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0102049,
title = {Resolution of the Age Discrepancies in Pulsar/SNR Associations},
author = {D. Marsden and R. E. Lingenfelter and R. E. Rothschild},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0102049},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Six pages and two figures; to appear in the proceedings of the Rome2000 mini workshop on SGRs and AXPs, to be published in Mem. S. A. It