Journal article

Spatially Resolved Study of Recombining Plasma in W49B Using XMM-Newton

Tyler Holland-Ashford, Laura A Lopez, Katie Auchettl

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2020

Abstract

W49B is the youngest supernova remnant (SNR) to date that exhibits recombining plasma. The two prevailing theories of this overionization are rapid cooling via adiabatic expansion or through thermal conduction with an adjacent cooler medium. To constrain the origin of the recombining plasma in W49B, we perform a spatially resolved spectroscopic study of deep XMM-Newton data across 46 regions. We adopt a three-component model (with one interstellar medium and two ejecta components), and we find that recombining plasma is present throughout the entire SNR, with increasing overionization from east to west. The latter result is consistent with previous studies, and we attribute the overionizatio..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D)


Awarded by Danish National Research Foundation


Funding Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewer for helpful feedback that improved the paper. We also thank Patrick Slane, Randall Smith, and John Raymond for useful discussions. L.A.L. is supported by a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation of Science Advancement. Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. KAA is supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF132).