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Register a new userOrigin of Thermal and Non-Thermal Hard X-ray Emission from the Galactic Center
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We analyse new results of Chandra and Suzaku which found a flux of hard X-ray emission from the compact region around Sgr A$^ast$ (r ~ 100 pc). We suppose that this emission is generated by accretion processes onto the central supermassive blackhole when an unbounded part of captured stars obtains an additional momentum. As a result a flux of subrelativistic protons is generated near the Galactic center which heats the background plasma up to temperatures about 6-10 keV and produces by inverse bremsstrahlung a flux of non-thermal X-ray emission in the energy range above 10 keV.
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The origin of the Galactic center diffuse X-ray emission (GCDX) is still under intense investigation. We have found a clear excess in a longitudinal GCDX profile over a stellar number density profile in the nuclear bulge region, suggesting a significant contribution of diffuse, interstellar hot plasma to the GCDX. We have estimated that contributions of an old stellar population to the GCDX are about 50 % and 20 % in the nuclear stellar disk and nuclear star cluster, respectively. Our near-infrared polarimetric observations show that the GCDX region is permeated by a large scale, toroidal magnetic field. Together with observed magnetic field strengths in nearly energy equipartition, the interstellar hot plasma could be confined by the toroidal magnetic field.
The brightest cluster radio halo known resides in the Coma cluster of galaxies. The relativistic electrons producing this diffuse synchrotron emission should also produce inverse Compton emission that becomes competitive with thermal emission from the ICM at hard X-ray energies. Thus far, claimed detections of this emission in Coma are controversial (Fusco-Femiano et al. 2004; Rossetti & Molendi 2004). We present a Suzaku HXD-PIN observation of the Coma cluster in order to nail down its non-thermal hard X-ray content. The contribution of thermal emission to the HXD-PIN spectrum is constrained by simultaneously fitting thermal and non-thermal models to it and a spatially equivalent spectrum derived from an XMM-Newton mosaic of the Coma field (Schuecker et al. 2004). We fail to find statistically significant evidence for non-thermal emission in the spectra, which are better described by only a single or multi-temperature model for the ICM. Including systematic uncertainties, we derive a 90% upper limit on the flux of non-thermal emission of 6.0x10^-12 erg/s/cm^2 (20-80 keV, for photon index of 2.0), which implies a lower limit on the cluster-averaged magnetic field of B>0.15 microG. Our flux upper limit is 2.5x lower than the detected non-thermal flux from RXTE (Rephaeli & Gruber 2002) and BeppoSAX (Fusco-Femiano et al. 2004). However, if the non-thermal hard X-ray emission in Coma is more spatially extended than the observed radio halo, the Suzaku HXD-PIN may miss some fraction of the emission. A detailed investigation indicates that ~50-67% of the emission might go undetected, which could make our limit consistent with these detections. The thermal interpretation of the hard Coma spectrum is consistent with recent analyses of INTEGRAL (Eckert et al. 2007) and Swift (Ajello et al. 2009) data.
Massive young star clusters contain dozens or hundreds of massive stars that inject mechanical energy in the form of winds and supernova explosions, producing an outflow which expands into their surrounding medium, shocking it and forming structures called superbubbles. The regions of shocked material can have temperatures in excess of 10$^6$ K, and emit mainly in thermal X-rays (soft and hard). This X-ray emission is strongly affected by the action of thermal conduction, as well as by the metallicity of the material injected by the massive stars. We present three-dimensional numerical simulations exploring these two effects, metallicity of the stellar winds and supernova explosions, as well as thermal conduction.
We report new Chandra hard X-ray ($>2rm~keV$) and JVLA C-band observations of the nuclear superbubble of NGC 3079, an analog of the Fermi bubble in our Milky Way. We detect extended hard X-ray emission on the SW side of the galactic nucleus with coherent multi-wavelength features in radio, H$alpha$, and soft X-ray. The hard X-ray feature has a cone shape with possibly a weak cap, forming a bubble-like structure with a diameter of $sim1.1rm~kpc$. A similar extended feature, however, is not detected on the NE side, which is brighter in all other wavelengths such as radio, H$alpha$, and soft X-ray. Scattered photons from the nuclear region or other nearby point-like X-ray bright sources, inverse Compton emission from cosmic ray electrons via interaction with the cosmic microwave background, or any individually faint stellar X-ray source populations, cannot explain the extended hard X-ray emission on the SW side and the strongly NE/SW asymmetry. A synchrotron emission model, plus a thermal component accounting for the excess at $sim1rm~keV$, can well characterize the broadband radio/hard X-ray spectra. The broadband synchrotron spectra do not show any significant cutoff, and even possibly slightly flatten at higher energy. This rules out a loss-limited scenario in the acceleration of the cosmic ray electrons in or around this superbubble. As the first detection of kpc-scale extended hard X-ray emission associated with a galactic nuclear superbubble, the spatial and spectral properties of the multi-wavelength emissions indicate that the cosmic ray leptons responsible for the broad-band synchrotron emission from the SW bubble must be accelerated in situ, instead of transported from the nuclear region of the galaxy.
Radio continuum observations detect non-thermal synchrotron and thermal bremsstrahlung radiation. Separation of the two different emission components is crucial to study the properties of diffuse interstellar medium. The Cygnus X region is one of the most complex areas in the radio sky which contains a number of massive stars and HII regions on the diffuse thermal and non-thermal background. More supernova remnants are expected to be discovered. We aim to develop a method which can properly separate the non-thermal and thermal radio continuum emission and apply it to the Cygnus X region. The result can be used to study the properties of different emission components and search for new supernova remnants in the complex. Multi-frequency radio continuum data from large-scale surveys are used to develop a new component separation method. Spectral analysis is done pixel by pixel for the non-thermal synchrotron emission with a realistic spectral index distribution and a fixed spectral index of beta = -2.1 for the thermal bremsstrahlung emission. With the new method, we separate the non-thermal and thermal components of the Cygnus X region at an angular resolution of 9.5arcmin. The thermal emission component is found to comprise 75% of the total continuum emission at 6cm. Thermal diffuse emission, rather than the discrete HII regions, is found to be the major contributor to the entire thermal budget. A smooth non-thermal emission background of 100 mK Tb is found. We successfully make the large-extent known supernova remnants and the HII regions embedded in the complex standing out, but no new large SNRs brighter than Sigma_1GHz = 3.7 x 10^-21 W m^-2 Hz^-1 sr^-1 are found.
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