Related papers: Crab GeV flares from corrugated termination shock
Pulsars and central engines of long gamma ray burst -- collapsars -- may produce highly magnetized (Poynting flux dominated) outflows expanding in a dense surrounding (interstellar medium or stellar material). For certain injection…
A young and energetic pulsar powers the well-known Crab Nebula. Here we describe two separate gamma-ray (photon energy >100 MeV) flares from this source detected by the Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The…
We study electron and positron acceleration at the termination shock of a striped pulsar wind. Drift motion along the shock surface keeps either electrons or positrons -but not both, close to the equatorial plane of the pulsar, where they…
The Crab pulsar and the surrounding nebula powered by the pulsar's rotational energy through the formation and termination of a relativistic electron-positron wind is a bright source of gamma-rays carrying crucial information about this…
We can probe observationally and reproduce theoretically intricate properties of the Crab Nebula nearest to the pulsar - The Inner Knot. The tiny knot is indeed a bright spot on the surface of a quasi-stationary magnetic relativistic shock…
In the last decade, the relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modelling of pulsar wind nebulae, and of the Crab nebula in particular, has been highly successful, with many of the observed dynamical and emission properties reproduced down…
The Crab pulsar and its nebula are very luminous and variable. Since 1982, random fluctuations of the dispersion measure (DM) have been recorded. Also in 2011, Fermi-LAT telescope detected $\gamma$-ray flux variation of the Crab nebula. No…
The flaring activity of the Crab Nebula is one of the most puzzling phenomena of the gamma ray sky. The light curves in the energy range E >100 MeV show a high flux variability on time scales ranging from hours to weeks, with sharp emission…
The Crab Nebula is one of the most efficient accelerators in the Galaxy and the only galactic source showing direct evidence of PeV particles. In spite of this, the physical process behind such effective acceleration is still a deep…
We show that the relativistic wind in the Crab pulsar, which is commonly thought to be invisible in the region upstream of the termination shock at R < 0.1 pc, in fact could be directly observed through its inverse Compton gamm-ray…
The Crab pulsar is the only astronomical pulsed source detected above 100 GeV. The emission mechanism of very high energy gamma-ray pulsation is not yet fully understood, although several theoretical models have been proposed. In order to…
After discussion of observational constraints on the nature of the MHD wind coupling between the Crab Pulsar and the Crab Nebula, the theory of transverse relativistic shock structure is reviewed and applied to the interpretation of the…
We report on the extremely intense and fast gamma-ray are above 100 MeV detected by AGILE from the Crab Nebula in mid-April 2011. This event is the fourth of a sequence of reported major gamma-ray flares produced by the Crab Nebula in the…
In 1989, the Whipple 10m telescope achieved the first indisputable detection of a TeV gamma-ray source, the Crab Nebula. Until its decommissioning in 2011, the Whipple telescope took regular measurements of the nebula. With the recent…
I outline, from a theoretical and somewhat personal perspective, significant features of Pulsar Wind Nebulae as Cosmic Accelerators. I discuss recent studies of Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe). I pay special attention to the recently discovered…
Two-dimensional, relativistic, MHD simulations of pulsar-wind powered nebulae provide strong constraints on the properties of the winds themselves. In particular, they confirm that Poynting flux must be converted into particle energy close…
Intriguing sub-TeV tails in the pulsed $\gamma$-ray emission from the Crab pulsar have been recently discovered by the MAGIC and VERITAS Collaborations. They were not clearly predicted by any pulsar model. It is at present argued that this…
Magnetic dissipation is frequently invoked as a way of powering the observed emission of relativistic flows in Gamma Ray Bursts and Active Galactic Nuclei. Pulsar Wind Nebulae provide closer to home cosmic laboratories which can be used to…
We study particle acceleration at the termination shock of a striped pulsar wind by integrating trajectories in a prescribed model of the magnetic field and flow pattern. Drift motion on the shock surface maintains either electrons or…
The recently discovered gamma-ray flares from the Crab nebula are generally attributed to the magnetic energy release in a highly magnetized region within the nebula. I argue that such a region naturally arises in the polar region of the…