ESA’s XMM-Newton took an X-ray image of this beautiful space creature known as the Manatee Nebula, spotting a site of unusual particle acceleration in its “head”.
The Manatee Nebula, or W50, is believed to be a large supernova remnant created when a giant star exploded about 30,000 years ago, throwing its envelopes of gases across the sky. It is one of the largest such features known, spanning the equivalent size of four full moons.
Unusually for a supernova remnant, a black hole remains at its core. This central “microquasar”, known as SS 433, emits powerful jets of particles traveling at close to a quarter of the speed of light, which pierce the gas shells, creating the double-part shape.
SS 433 is identified by the red dot in the middle of the image. X-ray data obtained by XMM-Newton are represented in yellow (soft X-rays), magenta (intermediate-energy X-rays) and cyan (hard X-ray emissions), while red is radio and green optical wavelengths imaged from the Very Large Array and the Skinakas Observatory in Greece respectively. NASA NuSTAR and Chandra data were also used for the study (not shown in this image).
The nebula gained attention in 2018 when the high-altitude Cherenkov Observatory, which is sensitive to very high-energy gamma rays, revealed the presence of high-energy particles (hundreds of teraelectronvolts), but could not determine where within Manatee the particles came from with origin.
XMM-Newton was critical in pinpointing the particle acceleration region in the X-ray jet shooting from Manatee’s head, which begins about 100 light-years from the microquasar (represented by the magnet and cyan colors to the left of SS 433) and extends to approximately 300 light-years (coinciding with the radio “ear” where the shock ends).
Samar Safi-Harb of the University of Manitoba, Canada, who led the research, says that “thanks to the new data from XMM-Newton, supplemented by data from NuSTAR and Chandra, we believe that particles are accelerated to very high energies at the head of Manatee by an unusually energetic process of particle acceleration. A black hole outflow likely made its way there and was recharged with high-energy radiation at that location, possibly due to shock waves in the expanding gas clouds and enhanced magnetic fields.
The nebula acts as a nearby laboratory for the study of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena associated with the outflow of many galactic and extragalactic sources and will be the subject of further investigation. Furthermore, follow-up studies from ESA’s future Athena X-ray Observatory will provide even more sensitive details about the inner workings of this curious space manatee.
The paper Hard X-ray emission from SS 433’s eastern jet feeding the W50 ‘Manatee’ nebula: Evidence for particle re-acceleration has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is also available via arXiv.
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