NuSTAR Discovery of a Young, Energetic Pulsar Associated with the Luminous Gamma-ray Source HESS J1640-465

Abstract

We report the discovery of a 206 ms pulsar associated with the TeV gamma-ray source HESS J1640-465 using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) X-ray observatory. PSR J1640-4631 lies within the shell-type supernova remnant (SNR) G338.3-0.0, and coincides with an X-ray point source and putative pulsar wind nebula (PWN) previously identified in XMM-Newton and Chandra images. It is spinning down rapidly with period derivative Pdot = 9.758(44)E-13, yielding a spin-down luminosity Edot = 4.4E36 erg s-1, characteristic age = P/2Pdot = 3350 yr, and surface dipole magnetic field strength Bs = 1.4E13 G. For the measured distance of 12 kpc to G338.3-0.0, the 0.2 - 10 TeV luminosity of HESS J1640-465 is 6% of the pulsar's present Edot. The Fermi source 1FHL J1640.5-4634 is marginally coincident with PSR J1640-4631, but we find no gamma-ray pulsations in a search using 5 years of Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data. The pulsar energetics support an evolutionary PWN model for the broad-band spectrum of HESS J1640-465, provided that the pulsar's braking index is approximately 2, and that its initial spin period was Po ~ 15 ms.

9 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables, Latex emulatapj style. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (5)

• The ATNF Pulsar Catalogue
• A Dynamical Model for the Evolution of a Pulsar Wind Nebula inside a Non-Radiative Supernova Remnant
• New Phase-coherent Measurements of Pulsar Braking Indices
• The distance and neutral environment of the massive stellar cluster Westerlund 1
• XMM-Newton observations reveal the X-ray counterpart of the very-high-energy gamma-ray source HESSJ1640-465

Cited by in corpus (18)

• The gas-to-extinction ratio and the gas distribution in the Galaxy
• The Dipole Magnetic Field and Spin-down Evolutions of The High Braking Index Pulsar PSR J1640-4631
• The soft gamma-ray pulsar population: an high-energy overview
• Pulsar-wind nebulae and magnetar outflows: observations at radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths
• Discovery of the hard spectrum VHE gamma-ray source HESS J1641-463
• Explaining high-braking indice of magnetars SGR 0501+4516 and 1E 2259+586 using the double magnetic-dipole model
• The dissipation of toroidal magnetic fields and spin-down evolution of young and strongly magnetized pulsars
• Interstellar gas towards the TeV gamma-ray sources HESS J1640-465 and HESS J1641-463
• Radio Detection of PSR J1813-1749 in HESS J1813-178: The Most Scattered Pulsar Known
• Dense molecular gas at 12 mm towards Galactic TeV gamma-ray sources
• Gravitational waves from pulsars with measured braking index
• Magnetic-field evolution with large-scale velocity circulation in a neutron-star crust
• HESS J1640-465 and HESS J1641-463: two intriguing TeV sources in the light of new Fermi LAT observations
• What can PSR J1640-4631 tell us about the internal physics of this neutron star?
• High braking index pulsar PSR J1640-4631: low-mass neutron star with a large inclination angle?
• Initial Results from NuSTAR Observations of the Norma Arm
• Broadband X-ray Spectroscopy of the Pulsar Wind Nebula in HESS J1640-465
• A high-magnetic-field radio pulsar survey with Swift/XRT