Extensive Non-Radiative Filaments in the Cygnus Loop

Details Extensive Non-Radiative Filaments in the Cygnus Loop Extensive Non-Radiative Filaments in the Cygnus Loop

Dec 1992

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992aas...181.7001h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 181st AAS Meeting, #70.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, p.1231

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

4

Scientific paper

We have obtained CCD images in Hα covering the northern perimeter of the Cygnus Loop, using the wide-field imaging capability of the Burrell Schmidt telescope and S2KA chip at Kitt Peak. Mosaics of these images reveal a near-continuous chain of non-radiative filaments extending about 90deg around the northern portion of the Loop. These faint filaments have an extremely thin, delicate morphology, surely the result of thin sheets of emission viewed edge-on, and are located several arcmin outside the familiar bright, radiative filaments. Non-radiative filaments emit almost exclusively in Balmer lines, and delineate the present position of primary supernova shocks (e.g. Hester, Raymond, and Danielson, Ap J Lett, 303, L17). The non-radiative filaments we have observed appear to trace the outer edge of X-ray emission, as observed with lower resolution from the Einstein IPC by Ku et al., (Ap J, 278, 615). In the limited field where our imagery overlaps with Ku et al's HRI images, the optical filaments coincide precisely with the leading edge of the X-ray emission. A few of the non-radiative filaments are faintly visible on the POSS plates, and crude comparison with our images indicates obvious proper motions ~ 0.1\ arcsec yr(-1) . The Balmer line widths in non-radiative filaments give a direct measure of the shock velocity, so the combination of high resolution spectroscopy and precise proper motion measurement could lead to a distance determination independent of the classic Hubble-Minkowski measurement of 770 pc based on kinematics of the bright, radiative filaments (Rev Mod Phys, 30, 1048). This work was supported in part by NSF grant AST-9114935 and by the W.M. Keck Foundation through the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium.

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