A Self-consistent Model of Shock-heated Plasma in Nonequilibrium States for Direct Parameter Constraints from X-Ray Observations

Abstract

X-ray observations of shock-heated plasmas, such as those found in supernova remnants (SNRs), often exhibit features of temperature and ionization nonequilibrium. For accurate interpretation of these observations, proper calculations of the equilibration processes are essential. Here, we present a self-consistent model of thermal X-ray emission from shock-heated plasmas that accounts for both temperature and ionization nonequilibrium conditions. For a given pair of shock velocity and initial electron-to-ion temperature ratio, the temporal evolution of the temperature and ionization state of each element was calculated by simultaneously solving the relaxation processes of temperature and ionization. The resulting thermal X-ray spectrum was synthesized by combining our model with the AtomDB spectral code. Comparison between our model and the nei model, a constant-temperature nonequilibrium ionization model available in the XSPEC software package, reveals a 30% underestimation of the ionization timescale in the nei model. We implemented our model in XSPEC to directly constrain the shock wave’s properties, such as the shock velocity and collisionless electron heating efficiency, from the thermal X-ray emission from postshock plasmas. We applied this model to archival Chandra data of the SNR N132D, providing a constraint on the shock velocity of ∼800 km s ^−1 , in agreement with previous optical studies.

Keywords

• Plasma astrophysics