Non-thermal radiation from Type Ia supernova remnants

Abstract

We present calculations of expected continuum emissions from Sedov-Taylor phase Type Ia supernova remnants (SNRs), using the energy spectra of cosmic ray (CR) electrons and protons from non-linear diffusive shock acceleration simulations. A new, general-purpose radiative process code, cosmicp, was employed to calculate the radiation expected from CR electrons and protons and their secondary products. These radio, X-ray and gamma-ray emissions are generally consistent with current observations of Type Ia SNRs. The emissions from electrons in these models dominate the radio through X-ray bands. Decays of π0s from p-p collisions mostly dominate the gamma-ray range, although for a hot, low-density ISM case (nISM= 0.003cm-3), the pion decay contribution is reduced sufficiently to reveal the inverse Compton contribution to TeV gamma-rays. In addition, we present simple scalings for the contributing emission processes to allow a crude exploration of model parameter space, enabling these results to be used more broadly. We also discuss the radial surface brightness profiles expected for these model SNRs in the X-ray and gamma-ray bands. © 2011 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.