Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2012-01-13
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Submitted to the Astrophysical Journal ; 18 pages, 11 figures and 3 tables
Scientific paper
The Wolf-Rayet (WR) bubble S 308 around the WR star HD 50896 is one of the only two WR bubbles known to possess X-ray emission. We present \textit{XMM-Newton} observations of three fields of this WR bubble that, in conjunction with an existing observation of its Northwest quadrant, map most of the nebula. The X-ray emission from S 308 displays a limb-brightened morphology, with a 22 arcmin in size central cavity and a shell thickness of ~ 8 arcmin. This X-ray shell is confined by the optical shell of ionized material. The spectrum is dominated by the He-like triplets of NVI at ~ 0.43 keV and OVII at ~ 0.5 keV, and declines towards high energies, with a faint tail up to 1 keV. This spectrum can be described by a two-temperature optically thin plasma emission model (T1 ~ 1.1 x 10^6 K, T2 ~ 13 x 10^6 K), with a total X-ray luminosity ~ 3 x 10^33 erg/s at the assumed distance of 1.8 kpc. Qualitative comparison of the X-ray morphology of S 308 with the results of numerical simulations of wind-blown WR bubbles suggests a progenitor mass of 40 Msun and an age in the WR phase ~ 20,000 yrs. The X-ray luminosity predicted by simulations including the effects of heat conduction is in agreement with the observations, however, the simulated X-ray spectrum indicates generally hotter gas than is derived from the observations. We suggest that non-equilibrium ionization (NEI) may provide an explanation for this discrepancy.
Arthur Jane S.
Chu Y.-H. Y.-H.
Gruendl Robert A.
Guerrero Martin A.
Smith Christopher R.
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