The Hard X-Ray View of the Young Supernova Remnant G1.9+0.3

Abstract

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).