NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft grants insights into Pulsar wind nebula 3C 58

Data from NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have granted insight into the mechanism behind Pulsar Wind Nebula (PWN) formation and evolution.

New data from X-ray observations using NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft and from the Chandra X-ray space observatory has yielded further insight into the nature of a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) named 3C 58. Results of the analysis could also shed more light on particle distribution in the population of known PWNe — nebulae powered by the wind of a pulsar.

NuSTAR images of 3C 58 in six energy bands. The energy bands for the images are 3–4.5 keV, 4.5–7 keV, 7–12 keV, 12–20 keV, 20–40 keV, and 40–60 keV from left to right and top to bottom. The images are smoothed and the scales are adjusted to have a value of 1 at the maximum for better legibility. Chandra white contours are overlaid in the top-left panel for reference (An et al., 2019)

When pulsar wind, which is composed of charged particles collides with the pulsar’s surroundings — comprised of the shed outer layers of the star — particularly with the slowly expanding supernova ejecta — it develops a PWN.

Observations of PWNe have shown that the particles in these objects lose their energy to radiation, becoming less energetic as their distance from the central pulsar increases. X-ray studies of PWNe have the potential of uncovering important information about particle flow in…