X-ray Evolution of Pulsar Wind Nebulae
Abstract
During the search for counterparts of very-high-energy gamma-ray sources, we serendipitously discovered large, extended, low surface brightness emission from PWNe around pulsars with the ages up to ~100 kyrs, a discovery made possible by the low and stable background of the Suzaku X-ray satellite. A systematic study of a sample of 8 of these PWNe, together with Chandra datasets, has revealed us that the nebulae keep expanding up to for ~100 kyrs, although time scale of the synchrotron X-ray emission is only ~60 yr for typical magnetic fields of 100 microG. Our result suggests that the accelerated electrons up to ~80 TeV can escape from the PWNe without losing most energies. Moreover, in order to explain the observed correlation between the X-ray size and the pulsar spindwon age, the magnetic field strength in the PWNe must decrease with time.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1007.3203,
title = {X-ray Evolution of Pulsar Wind Nebulae},
author = {Aya Bamba and Takayasu Anada and Tadayasu Dotani and Koji Mori and Ryo Yamazaki and Ken Ebisawa and Jacco Vink},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.3203},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
11 pages, 17 figures, ApJL, in press