Observations of young core-collapse supernova remnants
by
Anestis Tziamtzis(SU)
→
Europe/Stockholm
FB52
FB52
Description
Studies of young remnants offer an opportunity to test theoretical
models of stellar evolution, explosion models and nucleosynthesis, as well
as our understanding of the compact objects in the centre of the exploded
stars.
The first part of my talk involves the Crab nebula, where I will focus
on observations to try to detect a faint halo around the visible
nebula. Such a halo could carry the missing mass and kinetic energy of
the nebula.
No halo was found, and I will discuss why, and how future observations could
be made more successful. For the Crab, I will also discuss its pulsar wind
nebula. In particular, variation in the emissivity in the near-IR. Flux
variations up to 20% in the near-IR and also wisp displacements
corresponding to velocities up to 0.2c were measured. By comparing with
old HST data, we showed that the nearby red knot moves in tandem with the
Crab pulsar.
The second part of the talk deals with SN 1987A. I will focus on the
evolution of its outer rings. From the spectroscopic data we measured
the density and temperature to be ~ 12,000 K for the [N II]-emitting
gas, and ~ 25,000 K for the [O III]. Finally, from [O II], and [SII]
line ratios, we estimate electron densities of ~ 1,000 cm-3 and ~
2,500 cm-3, respectively. From the evolution of H-alpha, we argue that
the highest density in the outer rings could be 5,000 cm-3. The outer
rings do not yet interact with the supernova ejecta, but they may now
start to become affected by the ejecta interaction with the inner
ring.
