The middle-aged pulsar PSR J1741–2054 and its bow-shock nebula in the far-ultraviolet^⋆

¹ Ioffe Institute, Politekhnicheskaya 26, St. Petersburg, 195251 Russia
² Pennsylvania State University, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, 525 Dave Lab., University Park, PA, 16802 USA
³ Oxford Astrophysics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3RH UK
⁴ The George Washington University, Department of Physics, 725 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20052 USA

^⋆⋆ Corresponding authors; vadab2077@gmail.com, ggp1@psu.edu

Received: 11 September 2024
Accepted: 2 March 2025

Abstract

Context. Far-ultraviolet (FUV) observations of pulsars allow us to measure surface temperatures of neutron stars and study their thermal evolution. Some pulsars can exhibit FUV bow-shock nebulae (BSNe), providing an additional tool for probing the interstellar medium and studying the pulsar’s properties. The nearby middle-aged gamma-ray pulsar J1741–2054 and its pulsar wind nebula (PWN) have been studied in X-rays, and its BSN has been investigated in the Balmer lines, but they have never been observed in the FUV.

Aims. To further study the thermal and magnetospheric emission from PSR J1741–2054 and the BSN properties, we observed them in the FUV range with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

Methods. We imaged the target in two FUV filters of the HST ACS/SBC detector. We also reanalyzed previous optical observations of the pulsar and its BSN. We fit the pulsar’s FUV-optical spectrum separately and together with its X-ray spectrum.

Results. We found that the pulsar’s FUV-optical spectrum consists of a thermal and a nonthermal component. A joint fit of the FUV-optical and X-ray spectra with combinations of the nonthermal and thermal components showed a hard optical nonthermal spectrum with a photon index Γ_opt ≈ 1.0–1.2 and a softer X-ray component, Γ_X ≈ 2.6–2.7. The thermal emission is dominated by the cold component with the temperature kT_cold ≈ 40–50 eV and emitting sphere radius R_cold ≈ 8–15 km, at d = 270 pc. An additional hot thermal component, with kT_hot ∼ 80 eV and R_hot ∼ 1 km, is also possible. Such a spectrum resembles the spectra of other middle-aged pulsars, but it shows a harder (softer) optical (X-ray) nonthermal spectrum. We detected the FUV BSN, the first one associated with a middle-aged pulsar. Its closed-shell morphology is similar to the Hα BSN morphology, while its FUV flux, ∼10⁻¹³ erg cm⁻² s⁻¹, is a factor of ∼4 higher than the Hα flux. This FUV BSN has a higher surface brightness than the two previously known BSNe.