The Nature of the H2-Emitting Gas in the Crab Nebula

TL;DR

This study investigates the formation and excitation of molecular hydrogen in the Crab Nebula's Knot 51, revealing that H2 forms mainly through associative detachment in an environment with extra heating, challenging previous models.

Contribution

The paper provides the first detailed modeling of H2 emission in the Crab Nebula, highlighting the role of associative detachment and environmental heating in molecular formation.

Findings

H2 emission is best explained by models with extra heating and atomic core environments.

H2 forms primarily through associative detachment, not grain catalysis.

The total mass of H2-emitting cores is about 0.1 solar masses, roughly 5% of the filament system.

Abstract

Understanding how molecules and dust might have formed within a rapidly expanding young supernova remnant is important because of the obvious application to vigorous supernova activity at very high redshift. In previous papers, we found that the H2 emission is often quite strong, correlates with optical low-ionization emission lines, and has a surprisingly high excitation temperature. Here we study Knot 51, a representative, bright example, for which we have available long slit optical and NIR spectra covering emission lines from ionized, neutral, and molecular gas, as well as HST visible and SOAR Telescope NIR narrow-band images. We present a series of CLOUDY simulations to probe the excitation mechanisms, formation processes and dust content in environments that can produce the observed H2 emission. We do not try for an exact match between model and observations given Knot 51's ambiguous geometry. Rather, we aim to explain how the bright H2 emission lines can be formed from within the volume of Knot 51 that also produces the observed optical emission from ionized and neutral gas. Our models that are powered only by the Crab's synchrotron radiation are ruled out because they cannot reproduce the strong, thermal H2 emission. The simulations that come closest to fitting the observations have the core of Knot 51 almost entirely atomic with the H2 emission coming from just a trace molecular component, and in which there is extra heating. In this unusual environment, H2 forms primarily by associative detachment rather than grain catalysis. In this picture, the 55 H2-emitting cores that we have previously catalogued in the Crab have a total mass of about 0.1 M_sun, which is about 5% of the total mass of the system of filaments. We also explore the effect of varying the dust abundance. We discuss possible future observations that could further elucidate the nature of these H2 knots.