2014/11/25 by Andreas Zoglauer, Stephen P. Reynolds, Hongjun An +14 · 29 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Near-Earth supernova #Physics #Supernova #Supernova remnant #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/798/2/98
published in The Astrophysical Journal 798(2), 98 (IOP Publishing) · 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted ApJ
arxiv created 2014/11/25 · openalex publication_date 2014/12/31 · arxiv updated 2015/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
NuSTAR observed G1.9+0.3, the youngest known supernova remnant in the Milky Way, for 350 ks and detected emission up to ∼30 keV. The remnant's X-ray morphology does not change significantly across the energy range from 3 to 20 keV. A combined fit between NuSTAR and Chandra shows that the spectrum steepens with energy. The spectral shape can be well fitted with synchrotron emission from a power-law electron energy distribution with an exponential cutoff with no additional features. It can also be described by a purely phenomenological model such as a broken power law or a power law with an exponential cutoff, though these descriptions lack physical motivation. Using a fixed radio flux at 1 GHz of 1.17 Jy for the synchrotron model, we get a column density of N H = (7.23 ± 0.07) × 10 22 cm −2 , a spectral index of α = 0.633 ± 0.003, and a roll-off frequency of ν rolloff = (3.07 ± 0.18) × 10 17 Hz. This can be explained by particle acceleration, to a maximum energy set by the finite remnant age, in a magnetic field of about 10 μG, for which our roll-off implies a maximum energy of about 100 TeV for both electrons and ions. Much higher magnetic-field strengths would produce an electron spectrum that was cut off by radiative losses, giving a much higher roll-off frequency that is independent of magnetic-field strength. In this case, ions could be accelerated to much higher energies. A search for 44 Ti emission in the 67.9 keV line results in an upper limit of 1.5 × 10 −5 photons cm −2 s −1 assuming a line width of 4.0 keV (1 sigma).