Southern eROSITA bubble as a forward shock and the low-metallicity CGM. South-east side story

TL;DR

The paper models the South-Eastern eROSITA bubble as a forward shock from a Galactic Center outburst, providing in situ measurements of the low-metallicity circumgalactic medium and implications for cosmic ray acceleration.

Contribution

It offers a new interpretation of the South-Eastern eROSITA bubble as a propagating forward shock and derives in situ properties of the CGM, including density, velocity, and metallicity.

Findings

Shock velocity ~700 km/s

Gas density ~3×10⁻⁴ cm⁻³

Metallicity Z ≲ 0.1 Z_⊙

Abstract

Unlike the complicated X-ray and radio structure observed in the North Polar Spur area, the South-Eastern part of the eROSITA bubbles can be reasonably well described as a propagating forward shock, plausibly created by the transient energy release at the Galactic Center. In this model, the physical radius of the bubble is $R_{\rm b}\sim 7-8\,{\rm kpc}$ and the age of the outburst is $t_{\rm age}\sim 5-8\,{\rm Myr}$. The visible segment of the shock front (located at a distance of $\sim 10-12\,{\rm kpc}$ above the Galactic Disk and at a similar distance from the Sun) is currently expanding with the velocity $\sim 700\,{\rm km\,s^{-1}}$ through the gas with density $n_e\sim 3\times 10^{-4}\,{\rm cm^{-3}}$, and the abundance of heavy elements in this gas is $Z\lesssim 0.1 \times Z_\odot$. Unlike constraints derived from the line-of-sight-integrated quantities, these are effectively in situ measurements of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) properties. Given the simplifying assumptions used in deriving the density, we assign a factor of 2 systematic uncertainty to the final estimate. An eventual decisive test for the shock properties can be provided by the velocity measurements of the X-ray-emitting gas with soft X-ray bolometers. The extended forward shock propagating through low-metallicity gas is a favorable site to accelerate very high-energy cosmic rays, which might contribute to the observed proton-rich galactic cosmic ray component at PeV energies.