Discovery of Year-Scale Time Variability from Thermal X-ray Emission in Tycho's Supernova Remnant

TL;DR

This study reports the first detection of time-variable thermal X-ray emission in Tycho's supernova remnant, revealing shock-heated interstellar medium clumps and providing insights into particle heating mechanisms.

Contribution

It presents the discovery of year-scale thermal X-ray variability in Tycho's SNR and constrains electron heating efficiency at the shock front.

Findings

Detection of a gradually-brightening thermal X-ray knot in Tycho's SNR.

Electron temperature of the knot increased from ~0.30 keV to ~0.69 keV between 2000 and 2015.

Constraints on electron-to-proton temperature ratio indicating collisionless electron heating.

Abstract

Mechanisms of particle heating are crucial to understanding the shock physics in supernova remnants (SNRs). However, there has been little information on time variabilities of thermalized particles so far. Here, we present a discovery of a gradually-brightening thermal X-ray emission found in Chandra data of Tycho's SNR obtained during 2000--2015. The emission exhibits a knot-like feature (Knot1) with a diameter of $\simeq0.04$~pc located in the northwestern limb, where we also find localized H$\alpha$ filaments in an optical image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008. The model with the solar abundance reproduces the spectra of Knot1, suggesting that Knot1 originates from interstellar medium; this is the first detection of thermal X-ray emission from swept-up gas found in Tycho's SNR. Our spectral analysis indicates that the electron temperature of Knot1 has increased from $\sim0.30$ keV to $\sim0.69$ keV within the period between 2000 and 2015. These results lead us to ascribe the time-variable emission to a small dense clump recently heated by the forward shock at the location of Knot1. The electron-to-proton temperature ratio immediately downstream the shock ($\beta_{0}\equiv T_e/T_p$) is constrained to be $m_e/m_p\leq\beta_{0}\leq0.15$ to reproduce the data, indicating the collisionless electron heating with efficiency consistent with previous H$\alpha$ observations of Tycho and other SNRs with high shock velocities.