Optical reconstruction of dust in the region of SNR RX J1713.7-3946 from astrometric data

TL;DR

This study uses Gaia astrometric data to identify faint dust clouds near SNR RX J1713.7-3946, estimating their mass and constraining the remnant's distance, which helps explain the origin of observed gamma-ray emissions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of using Gaia data to detect faint dust structures and precisely determine the supernova remnant's distance.

Findings

Identified a dust cloud near RX J1713.7-3946 with estimated mass of 7,000 solar masses.

Constrained the supernova remnant's distance to 1.12 kpc with high precision.

Suggested the dust cloud could contain the missing protons responsible for gamma-ray emission.

Abstract

The origin of the radiation observed in the region of the supernova remnant RX J1713.7-3946, one of the brightest TeV emitters, has been debated since its discovery. The existence of atomic and molecular clouds in this object supports the idea that part of the GeV gamma rays in this region originate from proton-proton collisions. However, the observed column density of protons derived from gas observations cannot explain the whole emission. Yet there could be a fraction of protons contained in fainter structures that have note been detected so far. Here we search for faint objects in the line of sight of RX J1713.7-3946 using the principle of light extinction and the ESA/Gaia DR2 astrometric and photometric data. We reveal and locate with precision a number of dust clouds and note that only one appears to be in the vicinity of RX J1713.7-3946. We estimate the embedded mass to $M_{dust} = (7.0 \pm 0.6) \times 10^3 \, M_{\odot}$ which might be big enough to contain the missing protons. Finally, using the fact that the supernova remnant is expected to be located in a dusty environment and that there appears to be only one such structure in the vicinity of RX J1713.7-3946, we set a very precise constrain to the supernova remnant distance, at ($1.12 \pm 0.01$) kpc.