GAMMA-RAY ACTIVITY IN THE CRAB NEBULA: THE EXCEPTIONAL FLARE OF 2011 APRIL

By R. Buehler, J. Scargle, R. Blandford, L. Baldini, M. Baring, A. Belfiore, E. Charles, J. Chiang, F. D’Ammando, C. Dermer and 11 more. 2011

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The Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi satellite observed a gamma-ray flare in the Crab Nebula lasting for approximately nine days in April of 2011. The source, which at optical wavelengths has a size of ≈11 lt-yr across, doubled its gamma-ray flux within eight hours. The peak photon flux was (186 ± 6) × 10−7 cm−2 s−1 above 100 MeV, which corresponds to a 30-fold increase compared to the average value. During the flare, a new component emerged in the spectral energy distribution, which peaked at an energy of (375 ± 26) MeV at flare maximum. The observations imply that the emission region was likely relativistically beamed toward us and that variations in its motion are responsible for the observed spectral variability.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/834b78a781a08f00d5b1b2ce92d0fac464aeb1d8

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Citations in the corpus

Pulsar Wind Nebulae as Cosmic Pevatrons: A Current Sheet’s Tale (2012, background): “…from the pulsar did not change—no variations in the pulsar spin aside from the regular spin down have been detected, and no 2See Carlson et al. (1994) for a review of earthquake dynamics. changes in the spectra or light curves of the pulsed emission appeared (Abdo et al. 2011; Buehler et al. 2012).”
Three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Crab nebula (2013, background): “Given that the variability time scale can be as short as few hours (Balbo et al. 2011; Buehler et al. 2012), this length is unlikely to exceed few light days and thus the magnetic field in the reconnection layer should be well in excess of the mean magnetic field strength in the nebula, which is…”
SIMULATIONS OF PARTICLE ACCELERATION BEYOND THE CLASSICAL SYNCHROTRON BURNOFF LIMIT IN MAGNETIC RECONNECTION: AN EXPLANATION OF THE CRAB FLARES (2013, background): “…discovered several powerful gamma-ray flares from the Crab Nebula (Tavani et al. 2011; Abdo et al. 2011; Balbo et al. 2011; Striani et al. 2011; Buehler et al. 2012; Striani et al. 2013a; Ojha et al. 2013; Striani et al. 2013b), presumably during which PeV electrons and positrons emit…”
Gamma-ray binaries and related systems (2013, background): “The detection of Xray and gamma-ray flares from the Crab nebula (Wilson-Hodge et al. 2011; Buehler et al. 2012) proves phenomenologically that PWN can be variable on much shorter timescales than previously thought possible.”
Fermi Large Area Telescope Fourth Source Catalog (2019, background): “The parameters of that component were fixed to α=1.75, β=0.08, K=5.5×10−13 ph cm−2 MeV−1 s−1 at 10GeV, mimicking the broken power law fit by Buehler et al. (2012).”
Reconnection-driven plasmoids in blazars: fast flares on a slow envelope (2012, background): “In particular such model can attempt to explain the day-long flares and shorter timescale variability observed during major flaring of the Crab (Abdo et al. 2011; Tavani et al. 2011; Buehler et al. 2012).”