Study of the excess Fe XXV line emission in the central degrees of the Galactic centre using XMM-Newton data^★

¹ INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via E. Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate (LC), Italy
e-mail: konstantina.anastasopoulou@inaf.it
² Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Gießenbachstraße 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
³ Universität Heidelberg, Zentrum für Astronomie, Institut für theoretische Astrophysik, Albert-Ueberle-Str. 2, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1547, USA
⁵ Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85741 Garching, Germany
⁶ Space Research Institute (IKI), Profsoyuznaya 84/32, Moscow 117997, Russia
⁷ Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), Glorieta de la Astronomía s/n, 18008 Granada, Spain
⁸ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Florence, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
⁹ National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 20A Datun Road, Beijing 100101, PR China
¹⁰ School of Astronomy and Space Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19A Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, PR China
¹¹ Universitäts-Sternwarte, Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Scheinerstr. 1, 81679 München, Germany
¹² Dr. Karl Remeis Observatory, Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Sternwartstraße 7, 96049 Bamberg, Germany

Received: 16 September 2022
Accepted: 4 January 2023

Abstract

The diffuse Fe XXV (6.7 keV) line emission observed in the Galactic ridge is widely accepted to be produced by a superposition of a large number of unresolved X-ray point sources. In the very central degrees of our Galaxy, however, the existence of an extremely hot (~7 keV) diffuse plasma is still under debate. In this work we measure the Fe XXV line emission using all available XMM-Newton observations of the Galactic centre (GC) and inner disc (−10° < ℓ < 10°, −2° < b < 2°). We use recent stellar mass distribution models to estimate the amount of X-ray emission originating from unresolved point sources, and find that within a region of ℓ = ±1° and b = ±0.25° the 6.7keV emission is 1.3–1.5 times in excess of what is expected from unresolved point sources. The excess emission is enhanced towards regions where known supernova remnants are located, suggesting that at least a part of this emission is due to genuine diffuse very hot plasma. If the entire excess is due to very hot plasma, an energy injection rate of at least ~6 × 10⁴⁰ erg s⁻¹ is required, which cannot be provided by the measured supernova explosion rate or past Sgr A^* activity alone. However, we find that almost the entire excess we observe can be explained by assuming GC stellar populations with iron abundances ~1.9 times higher than those in the bar/bulge, a value that can be reproduced by fitting diffuse X-ray spectra from the corresponding regions. Even in this case, a leftover X-ray excess is concentrated within ℓ = ±0.3° and b = ±0.15°, corresponding to a thermal energy of ~2 × 10⁵² erg, which can be reproduced by the estimated supernova explosion rate in the GC. Finally we discuss a possible connection to the observed GC Fermi-LAT excess.