Reconstructing the Guitar: Blowing Bubbles with a Pulsar Bow Shock Back Flow

Abstract

The Guitar Nebula is an H-alpha nebula produced by the interaction of the relativistic wind of a very fast pulsar, PSR B2224+65, with the interstellar medium. It consists of a ram-pressure confined bow shock near its head and a series of semi-circular bubbles further behind, the two largest of which form the body of the Guitar. We present a scenario in which this peculiar morphology is due to instabilities in the back flow from the pulsar bow shock. From simulations, these back flows appear similar to jets and their kinetic energy is a large fraction of the total energy in the pulsar's relativistic wind. We suggest that, like jets, these flows become unstable some distance down-stream, leading to rapid dissipation of the kinetic energy into heat, and the formation of an expanding bubble. We show that in this scenario the sizes, velocities, and surface brightnesses of the bubbles depend mostly on observables, and that they match roughly what is seen for the Guitar. Similar instabilities may account for features seen in other bow shocks.

4 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (6)

• The Evolution and Structure of Pulsar Wind Nebulae
• Smashing the Guitar: An Evolving Neutron Star Bow Shock
• X-ray Observations of Parsec-Scale Tails behind Two Middle-Aged Pulsars
• X-ray emission properties of the old pulsar PSR B2224+65
• Chandra observations of the pulsar PSR B1929+10 and its environment
• Radio and X-ray nebulae associated with PSR J1509-5850

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• Mass-loading of bow shock pulsar wind nebulae
• The Balmer-dominated Bow Shock and Wind Nebula Structure of Gamma-ray Pulsar PSR J1741-2054
• PSR J2030+4415's Remarkable Bow Shock, PWN and Filament
• From young to old: the evolutionary path of Pulsar Wind Nebulae
• Toward understanding the physical underpinnings of spatial and spectral morphologies of pulsar wind nebulae
• Bow-shock Pulsar Wind Nebulae Passing Through Density Discontinuities
• Numerical simulations of mass loading in the tails of Bow Shock Pulsar Wind Nebulae
• Discovery of a Synchrotron Bubble Associated with PSR J1015-5719
• Fast moving pulsars as probes of interstellar medium