Related papers: Observational Constraints on Pulsar Wind Theories
Recent observations suggest that many old pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are bright TeV gamma-ray sources without a strong X-ray counterpart. In this paper, we study the spectral evolution of PWNe taking into account the energy which was…
We numerically study the radiative properties of the reverberation phase of pulsar wind nebulae. Reverberation brings a significant evolution in a short period of time. We show that even the Crab nebula, associated to the more energetic…
Recent observations have shown that some compact stellar binaries radiate the highest energy light in the universe. The challenge has been to determine the nature of the compact object and whether the very high energy gamma-rays are…
Slightly more than 30 years ago, Whipple detection of the Crab Nebula was the start of Very High Energy gamma-ray astronomy. Since then, gamma-ray observations of this source have continued to provide new surprises and challenges to…
Using the exact solution of the axisymmetric pulsar magnetosphere derived in a previous publication and the conservation laws of the associated MHD flow, we show that the Lorentz factor of the outflowing plasma increases linearly with…
In recent years, surprise discoveries of pulsed emission from the Crab and Vela pulsars above 100 GeV have drawn renewed attention to this largely unexplored region of the energy range. In this paper, we discuss example light curves due to…
Unpulsed, high-energy emission from pulsar binaries can be attributed to the interaction of a pulsar wind with that of a companion star. At the shock between the outflows, particles carried away from the pulsar magnetosphere are accelerated…
The dynamics of a standing shock front in a Poynting-flux dominated relativistic flow is investigated by using a one-dimensional, relativistic, two-fluid simulation. An upstream flow containing a circularly polarized, sinusoidal magnetic…
For pulsars similar to the one in the Crab Nebula, most of the energy input to the surrounding wind nebula occurs on a timescale of less than 1000 years; during this time, the nebula expands into freely expanding supernova ejecta. On a…
Binary pulsar systems emit potentially detectable components of gamma ray emission due to Comptonization of the optical radiation of the companion star by relativistic electrons of the pulsar wind, both before and after termination of the…
We interpret the observed X-ray morphology of the central part of the Crab Nebula (torus + jets) in terms of the standard theory by Kennel and Coroniti (1984). The only new element is the inclusion of anisotropy in the energy flux from the…
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…
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…
High resolution UV spectra of stellar H I Lyman-alpha lines from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) provide observational constraints on the winds of coronal main sequence stars, thanks to an astrospheric absorption signature created by the…
There is growing evidence that some variable high-energy gamma-ray sources are associated with pulsar wind nebulae. We review the current status of X-ray and radio studies of the sources most likely to be significant emitters above 100 MeV.…
For many years it has been considered puzzling how pulsar radio emission, supposedly created by a circulating carousel of sub-beams, can produce the driftbands demonstrated by PSR J0815+09, and more recently PSR B1839-04, which…
LS 5039 and LSI +61 303 are unique amongst high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXB) for their spatially-resolved radio emission and their counterpart at >GeV gamma-ray energies, canonically attributed to non-thermal particles in an accretion-powered…
Spontaneous breaking of Lorentz symmetry at energies on the order of the Planck energy or lower is predicted by many quantum gravity theories, implying non-trivial dispersion relations for the photon in vacuum. Consequently, gamma-rays of…
The gamma-ray binaries LS 5039 and LS I +61 303 have been detected by Cerenkov telescopes at TeV energies, exhibiting periodic behavior correlated with the orbital period. These gamma-ray binary systems have also been recently detected by…
Rotating neutron stars, or pulsars, are plausibly the source of power behind many astrophysical systems, such as gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants. In the past several years, 3D numerical simulations…