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ECAP Seminar: Martin Mayer
June 27 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Rotation-powered pulsars and their nebulae – the eROSITA view
SRG/eROSITA is a soft X-ray (0.2 – 10 keV) telescope which has carried out the deepest X-ray all-sky survey to date. In this talk, I will present how the eROSITA data can be used to study rotation-powered pulsars and their pulsar wind nebulae, exemplified by two projects:
Firstly, the surveying power of eROSITA has allowed us to carry out a systematic search for new high-energy pulsars through a cross-match with gamma-ray sources detected by Fermi-LAT. The resulting candidate list is expected to yield detections of several tens of new pulsars, and can ideally be followed up by looking for signatures of pulsed radio emission, or orbitally modulated optical emission from a binary companion, at the candidate positions.
Secondly, eROSITA’s sensitivity has enabled us to study the X-ray synchrotron emission of Vela X, the wind nebula of the Vela pulsar, at unprecedented detail. This study led to the discovery of an extremely extended nonthermally emitting component, reaching radii up to 15 pc from the Vela pulsar. Its large size can possibly be explained through particle transport by diffusion, akin to the halos discovered around older pulsars in gamma-rays.