Revisiting the Southern Vela "Jet"

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

1

Scientific paper

The Vela supernova remanant (SNR) has been extensively studied in X-rays. ROSAT observations revealed a filamentary X-ray structure about 45' in length, south-southwest of the Vela pulsar. Markwardt and Ogelman (1997) interpreted this feature as a jet along which the Vela pulsar loses mechanical energy. Gvaramadze (1999) later interpreted this feature as a dense filament in the SNR shell, connected to the projection effects of the Rayleigh-Taylor unstable shell, and unrelated to the pulsar itself. Subsequent Chandra observations show that the pulsar does indeed have a jet, but that it is actually oriented along a northwest-southeast axis, roughly along the proper motion vector of the pulsar, and not in the direction of the extended ROSAT structure. However, recent H.E.S.S. observations have revealed TeV gamma-ray emission emanating from this region, indicating the presence of some mechanism by which particles are accelerated to extremely high energies.Using archival XMM observations, we have investigated the X-ray spectrum of the extreme southern edge of this feature. Consistent with previous ASCA results, we find that a two-component spectrum is required. The hard component is best described by a power law, and the accompanying thermal emission from this region appears to have abundances of several species that are enhanced above the values found for the bulk of the Vela SNR. Here we summarize the spectral results and investigate the energetics of the nonthermal component in the context of the TeV emission from this region of Vela.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

Revisiting the Southern Vela "Jet" does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Revisiting the Southern Vela "Jet", we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Revisiting the Southern Vela "Jet" will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1855072

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.