The Pursuit for Gamma-ray Emitting Pulsar Wind Nebulae with the Fermi-Large Area Telescope

TL;DR

This study systematically searches for gamma-ray counterparts to known pulsar wind nebulae using 11.5 years of Fermi-LAT data, significantly increasing the number of identified PWNe in the MeV-GeV band.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive Fermi-LAT analysis targeting known PWNe, doubling the detected population and identifying new gamma-ray PWN candidates.

Findings

11 firm PWN gamma-ray counterparts identified

22 PWN candidates detected in gamma-rays

Significant increase in gamma-ray detected PWNe

Abstract

There are at least 125 Galactic pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) that have been discovered from radio wavelengths to TeV gamma-rays, the majority of which were first identified in radio or X-ray surveys. An increasing number of PWNe are being identified in the TeV band by ground-based air Cherenkov Telescopes such as HESS, MAGIC, and VERITAS such that they constitute the dominant source class of Galactic TeV emitters. Combining available MeV-GeV data with observations in the TeV band is critical for precise characterization of high-energy emission from the relativistic particle population in PWNe, thus revealing the capability to produce a significant fraction of the detected Galactic CR flux. However, MeV-GeV PWN counterparts are still largely lacking even after 12 years of continuous observation of the entire sky. Less than a dozen PWNe are currently identified by the Fermi-LAT in the MeV-GeV band. Most PWNe are located along the Galactic plane embedded within the prominent, diffuse Galactic gamma-ray emission, which makes these sources difficult to disentangle from the bright diffuse background. We present a systematic search for gamma-ray counterparts to known PWNe in the 300MeV - 2TeV energy band using 11.5 years of Fermi-LAT data. For the first part of this search, we target the locations of PWNe previously identified across the electromagnetic spectrum that are not powered by pulsars previously detected by the Fermi-LAT as pulsating gamma-ray signals, which includes 6 Fermi PWNe and 7 Fermi PWN associations. We report the analysis of 58 total regions of interest and provide all firm and tentative detections along with their morphological and spectral characteristics. There are 11 unidentified gamma-ray sources that we classify as firm PWN counterparts, which doubles the PWN population detected by the Fermi-LAT, and 22 gamma-ray sources that are PWN candidates.