Detection of the hard X-ray non-thermal emission from Kepler's supernova remnant

TL;DR

This paper reports the first detection of hard X-ray emission from Kepler's supernova remnant, analyzing its spectrum and modeling the non-thermal emission with a leptonic scenario to understand electron acceleration limits.

Contribution

First robust detection of 15-30 keV X-ray emission from Kepler's SNR using Suzaku, with spectral analysis and leptonic modeling to constrain electron acceleration.

Findings

Detected X-ray emission with 7.17 sigma significance

Spectral fit indicates a single power-law with photon index ~3.13

Broad-band spectrum consistent with a one-zone leptonic model

Abstract

We report the first robust detection of the hard X-ray emission in the 15--30\,keV band from Kepler's supernova remnant with the silicon PIN-type semiconductor detector of the hard X-ray detector (HXD-PIN) onboard Suzaku. The detection significance is 7.17 $\sigma$ for the emission from Kepler's entire X-ray emitting region. The energy spectrum is found to be well reproduced by a single power-law function with a photon index of $3.13^{+1.85+0.69}_{-1.52-0.36}$, where the first and second errors represent 90\%-statistical and systematic errors, respectively. The X-ray flux is determined to be 2.75$_{-0.77-0.82}^{+0.78+0.81}\times10^{-12}$\,erg\,s$^{-1}$\,cm$^{-2}$ in the 15--30\,keV band. The wider-band X-ray spectrum in the 3--30\,keV band, where the soft X-ray Suzaku/XIS spectrum is combined, shows that the non-thermal component does not have a significant X-ray roll-off structure. We find that the broad-band energy spectrum from the radio band, X-ray data of this work, and TeV upper limits can be reproduced with the one-zone leptonic model with a roll-off energy of $\nu_{\mathrm{roll}}=1.0\times10^{17}$\,Hz and magnetic field strength of $B>40\,\mathrm{\mu G}$. Application of the diagnostic method using indices in the soft and hard X-ray band to the data indicates that the maximum energy of the accelerated electrons in Kepler's SNR is limited by the age of the remnant. The indication is consistent with the results of the one-zone leptonic modeling.