Synchrotron Emission From Young And Nearby Pulsars

TL;DR

This paper models synchrotron emission from electrons and positrons emitted by young pulsars to explain observed cosmic ray features and predicts bright, distinctive signals in the sky.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of synchrotron emission from a large sample of young pulsars and compares predictions with observational data.

Findings

Bright synchrotron features from Vela and Crab pulsars are expected if they inject ~10^48 erg or more.

Predicted hard synchrotron emission aligns qualitatively with WMAP observations.

Young pulsars could significantly contribute to the observed cosmic ray positron fraction.

Abstract

The rising cosmic ray positron fraction reported by the PAMELA collaboration has lead to a great deal of interest in astrophysical sources of energetic electrons and positrons, including pulsars. In this paper, we calculate the spectrum of synchrotron emission from electrons and positrons injected from 376 young pulsars (<10^6 years) contained in the ATNF catalog, and compare our results to observations. We find that if objects such as the Vela and Crab pulsars have injected ~10^48 erg or more in energetic electrons and/or positrons, they are expected to produce bright and distinctive features in the synchrotron sky. Intriguingly, we predict hard synchrotron emission from these regions of the sky which is qualitatively similar to that observed by WMAP.