Related papers: Pulsar bow-shock nebulae. II. Hydrodynamical simul…
I survey recent successes in the application of relativistic MHD and force-free electrodynamics to the modeling of the pulsars' rotational energy loss mechanism as well as to the structure and emission characteristics of Pulsar Wind…
Composite supernova remnants consist of a pulsar wind nebula located inside a shell-type remnant. The presence of a shell has implications on the evolution of the nebula, although the converse is generally not true. The purpose of this…
Bow shocks generated by pulsars moving through weakly ionized interstellar medium (ISM) produce emission dominated by non-equilibrium atomic transitions. These bow shocks are primarily observed as H$_\alpha$ nebulae. We developed a package,…
X-ray emission from wind-driven bow shocks is both difficult to measure and predict, but may give important insights into the energy budget of the hot phase of the ISM by quantifying mixing at the interface between hot and warm gas phases.…
Many massive stars travel through the interstellar medium at supersonic speeds. As a result they form bow shocks at the interface between the stellar wind. We use numerical hydrodynamics to reproduce such bow shocks numerically, creating…
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…
Hydrodynamical simulations played an important role in understanding the dynamics and shaping of planetary nebulae in the past century. However, hydrodynamical simulations were just a first order approach. The new millennium arrived with…
We have detected an Halpha bow shock nebula around PSR J1741-2054, a pulsar discovered through its GeV gamma-ray pulsations. The pulsar is only ~1.5" behind the leading edge of the shock. Optical spectroscopy shows that the nebula is…
The Crab Nebula demonstrates that neutron stars can interact with their environments in spectacular fashion, their relativistic winds generating nebulae observable across the electromagnetic spectrum. At many previous conferences,…
Our understanding of Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe), has greatly improved in the last years thanks to unprecedented high resolution images taken from the HUBBLE, CHANDRA and XMM satellites. The discovery of complex but similar inner features,…
We present here the first effort to compute synthetic synchrotron polarization maps of Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe). Our goal is to highlight how polarization can be used as an additional diagnostic tool for the flow structure in the inner…
Using a code that employs a self-consistent method for computing the effects of photo-ionization on circumstellar gas dynamics, we model the formation of wind-driven nebulae around massive stars. We take into account changes in stellar…
In this contribution we review the recent progress in the modeling of Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWN). We start with a brief overview of the relevant physical processes in the magnetosphere, the wind-zone and the inflated nebula bubble. Radiative…
The interaction of high-velocity neutron stars with the interstellar medium produces bow shock nebulae, where the relativistic neutron star wind is confined by ram pressure. We present multi-wavelength observations of the Guitar Nebula,…
Stellar bow shocks result from relative motions between stars and their environment. The interaction of the stellar wind and radiation with gas and dust in the interstellar medium produces curved arcs of emission at optical, infrared, and…
Pulsar wind nebulae are efficient particle accelerators, and yet the processes at work remain elusive. Self-generated, microturbulence is too weak in relativistic magnetized shocks to accelerate particles over a wide energy range,…
Collisionless shocks and plasma turbulence are crucial ingredients for a broad range of astrophysical systems. The shock-turbulence interaction, and in particular the transmission of fully developed turbulence across the quasi-perpendicular…
Detailed modeling of the high-energy emission from gamma-ray binaries has been propounded as a path to pulsar wind physics. Fulfilling this ambition requires a coherent model of the flow and its emission in the region where the pulsar wind…
We present a model of a pulsar wind nebula evolving inside its associated supernova remnant. The model uses a hydrodynamics code to simulate the evolution of this system when the pulsar has a high velocity. The simulation distinguishes four…
A plausible model for the Crab Nebula is one in which a particle dominated, highly relativistic wind from the pulsar passes through a shock front in which the particles attain a power law energy distribution. The electrons and positrons…