Pulsar wind nebulae in supernova remnants

Spherically symmetric hydrodynamical simulations

¹ Astronomical Institute, Utrecht University, PO Box 80000, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands
² Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 5 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Republic of Ireland
³ Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy
⁴ Service d'Astrophysique, CEA Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
⁵ Department of Atomic Physics, Pázmány Péter sétány 1, 1117 Budapest, Hungary

Corresponding author: E. van der Swaluw, swaluw@cp.dias.ie

Received: 19 December 2000
Accepted: 27 September 2001

Abstract

A spherically symmetric model is presented for the interaction of a pulsar wind with the associated supernova remnant. This results in a pulsar wind nebula whose evolution is coupled to the evolution of the surrounding supernova remnant. This evolution can be divided in three stages. The first stage is characterised by a supersonic expansion of the pulsar wind nebula into the freely expanding ejecta of the progenitor star. In the next stage the pulsar wind nebula is not steady; the pulsar wind nebula oscillates between contraction and expansion due to interaction with the reverse shock of the supernova remnant: reverberations which propagate forward and backward in the remnant. After the reverberations of the reverse shock have almost completely vanished and the supernova remnant has relaxed to a Sedov solution, the expansion of the pulsar wind nebula proceeds subsonically. In this paper we present results from hydrodynamical simulations of a pulsar wind nebula through all these stages in its evolution. The simulations were carried out with the Versatile Advection Code.