The study looks at diffuse emissions from a cigar galaxy

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The study looks at diffuse emissions from a cigar galaxy

Chandra X-ray images of the central part of M82 were merged through 13 observations. Credit: Iwasawa et al, 2023

Using NASA’s Chandra spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has made X-ray observations of the Cigar Galaxy. Results of the Monitoring Campaign, presented March 16 on Preprint Depository arXivproviding important information regarding diffuse emissions from this galaxy.

Discovered in 1774, Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82 or M82) is a starburst galaxy It falls around 11.73 million light years Far away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is about 40,800 light-years across and is one of the closest starbursts galaxies to ground.

Observations of the Cigar Galaxy have found that it is exposed to a wide-ranging galactic wind of various wavelengths, for example, in hard X-rays above a few keV. These superwinds appear to be concentrated in the galaxy’s two high surface brightness regions or clumps, fueled by energy released by supernovae within the clumps that occur at a rate of about one every ten years. Previous Chandra studies of this galaxy revealed bright X-ray binaries dominating the solid X-ray band and revealed diffuse residual emission surrounding the starburst disk.

Recently, a group of astronomers led by Kazushi Iwasawa of the University of Barcelona, ​​Spain decided to take a closer look at this diffuse emission from the Cigar Galaxy. They used Chandra to perform a spatially resolved spectroscopy of the diffuse emission in the 4–8 keV range.

“We present the first spatially-resolved X-ray spectroscopy study of the 4-8 keV diffuse emission found in the central part of the nearby starburst galaxy M82 on scales of a few arcseconds. The new details we see allow a number of important inferences to be made about the nature and origin of the hot gas,” the researchers explained. and feedback on the interstellar medium.”

The observations found that the 4-8 keV diffuse emission from the Cigar Galaxy consists of three spectral components with distinct origins. The first, inverse Compton emission, exhibits about 70% of the continuous luminosity in the band. The second is the hard tail of the soft X-ray wind emission, and the remaining component is a hot, metal-rich gaseous emission.

The morphology of the diffuse X-ray emission from the Cigar Galaxy is similar to that of the far infrared and radio emission. This points to the inverse Compton scattering of far infrared photons by cosmic ray electrons as a hypothesis explaining the origin of the non-thermal emission.

Moreover, the study detected hot gas in a limited region near the galactic disk. Gas appears to be pouring out from the eastern part of the starburst ring and filling so-called stacks (structures parallel to the superbubble bursting from the galactic disk) that are characterized by radio and mid-infrared voids. These stacks were found to dominate the transmission of the supernova’s energy flow from the disk to the corona.

The research also found that the brightest radio and X-ray supernova remnants in the Cigar Galaxy reside in Giant molecular clouds presumably newly formed and therefore free from strong supernova reactions.

more information:
K. Iwasawa et al, Origin of the 4–8 keV diffuse emission at M82, arXiv (2023). doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2303.09637

Journal information:
arXiv


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the quote: Study Looking at Diffuse Emissions from the Cigar Galaxy (2023, March 27) Retrieved March 28, 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-03-diffuse-emission-cigar-galaxy.html

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