A Study of the Non-Thermal X-ray Emission of Shell-Type Supernova Remnants

The term of the forth year of the award is the period from March 15, 2003 to March 14, 2004. During this year, Dr. Thomas Pannuti, who had been performing most of the analyses, made a transition to a new position at Caltech. As of September 2003, Dr. Michael Stage began performing most of the analyses. Dr. Stage has begun constructing a detailed catalog of the spatial and spectral properties of young supernova remnants as described in sections 1 and 4 of the proposal. Specifically, he has focused on the analysis of Chandra ACIS data. The exquisite spatial resolution of the Chandra telescope and the modest spectral resolution of the CCDs make these data ideal. Dr. Stage has developed a standard set of procedures to reduce the data, generate telescope and detector response libraries and handle instrumental and celestial background subtraction. He has also adapted some existing code to automate spectral extraction and fitting. This code enables us to analyze the spectra of tens of thousands of small subregions of supernova remnants. Dr. Stage has recently applied this process to ACIS data for the supernova remnants Cas A and Kepler. The results include maps of the fitted parameters, such as individual line intensities and centroids (i.e. Doppler shifts), the electron temperature, and the absorption column density. These maps are more accurate than simple energy-cut images because it is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to cleanly separate the line emission from the underlying continuum (especially at low energies). It is now possible to identify the locations at which emission from each element is produced. Some of the elements are seen to be layered. The electron temperature maps demonstrate that the outer edges of Cas A and Kepler are very hot with weak lines. This emission is almost certainly synchrotron dominated. Therefore, not only are the maps interesting in and of themselves, but they also provide an unbiased means of easily identifying features in the remnants that can be studied in more detail using, for example, synchrotron models. Over the next year, Dr. Stage will refine the analysis procedures, expand the analyses to include several other remnants, present the results at major scientific conferences and publish a catalog of the results. Since this work is producing impressive results, we have applied for very long Chandra observations of Kepler and Tycho to obtain enough counts to take lull advantage of the technique. A i Ms observation of Cas A is already scheduled. Over the past year, I completed a joint, spectra,l analysis of some X-ray, radio, and gamma-ray data for the supernova remnant SN 1006. The results of this analysis show that the synchrotron and, hence, electron spectrum of the remnant is curved. The amount of curvature in the electron spectrum is quantitatively consistent with predictions of the amount of curvature in the proton spectrum of the remnant. A paper describing this work is nearly complete. When Dr. Pannuti left, he was analyzing X-ray data for the young supernova remnant G266.2-1.2. Dr. Pannuti found the first evidence of thermal X-ray emission from this remnant. Furthermore, like SN 1006, the cutoff frequency varies with azimuth along the bright northeastern rim. This work will be published during the coming year.