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A Colorful Pair: Pulsar and Pulsar Wind Nebula Observed with Suzaku

Suzaku is Japan's fifth X-ray astromy satellite launched on July 10, 2005. Suzaku DARTS is archiving all the Suzaku scientific and house keeping data, some of which are already made publically available.

The X-ray and radio pulsar PSR1509-58 (sequence number 100009010) was observed on August 23 to 24, 2005; this is one of the early release data.

The pseudo-color X-ray image on the left-hand side indicates the pulsar PSR 1509-58 (central source), and the associated "pulsar wind nebula" at upper-right which is powered by the strong winds from the pulsar. The color indicates X-ray energies, such that Red, Green, Blue, respectively, corresponds to Soft (0.2-2 keV), Medium (2-4 keV) and Hard (4-10 keV) X-ray photons. The image is created with DARTS's new service UDON (Universe via DARTS ON-line). The pulsar wind nebulae, which is displayed in red, has a thermal, soft spectrum, indicating that the nebula is dominated by lower energy photons than the central pulsar. Using the HXD PIN data, pulsation of the central pulsar is clearly seen with the period of 151.35328 msec (the folded light-curve in the right-hand side).

March 2007