Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2005-03-08
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Proc. of Int. Symp. on High Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy, Heidelberg (July 2004)
Scientific paper
10.1063/1.1878421
The recent X-ray and CO observations of RX J1713.7-3946 show that a significant fraction of the nonthermal X-ray emission of this unique supernova remnant associates, in one way or another, with a molecular cloud interacting with the west part of the shell. This adds a new puzzle in the origin of X-ray emission which cannot be easily explained within the standard model in accordance of which X-rays are result of synchrotron radiation of multi-TeV electrons accelerated by supernova shock waves. We explore an alternative origin of the X-ray emission assuming that it is produced by secondary electrons resulting from high energy hadronic interactions in the molecular gas. Such a scenario could explain in a quite natural way the apparent correlation between the X-ray and CO morphologies. However, the TeV gamma-ray emission recently reported by H.E.S.S. significantly constrains the parameter space of this model. Namely, this mechanism cannot reproduce the bulk of the observed X-ray flux unless one postulates existence of a PeV cosmic-ray component penetrating with an unusually hard spectrum into the dense cloud.
Aharonian Felix A.
Fukui Yasuo
Hiraga Junko S.
Moriguchi Yoshiaki
Takahashi Tadayuki
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