Rapid Deceleration of Blast Waves Witnessed in Tycho's Supernova Remnant

Abstract

In spite of their importance as standard candles in cosmology and as major major sites of nucleosynthesis in the Universe, what kinds of progenitor systems lead to type Ia supernovae (SN) remains a subject of considerable debate in the literature. This is true even for the case of Tycho's SN exploded in 1572 although it has been deeply studied both observationally and theoretically. Analyzing X-ray data of Tycho's supernova remnant (SNR) obtained with Chandra in 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2015, we discover that the expansion before 2007 was substantially faster than radio measurements reported in the past decades and then rapidly decelerated during the last ~ 15 years. The result is well explained if the shock waves recently hit a wall of dense gas surrounding the SNR. Such a gas structure is in fact expected in the so-called single-degenerate scenario, in which the progenitor is a binary system consisting of a white dwarf and a stellar companion, whereas it is not generally predicted by a competing scenario, the double-degenerate scenario, which has a binary of two white dwarfs as the progenitor. Our result thus favors the former scenario. This work also demonstrates a novel technique to probe gas environments surrounding SNRs and thus disentangle the two progenitor scenarios for Type Ia SNe.

8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJL

References in corpus (4)

• Tycho Brahe's 1572 supernova as a standard type Ia explosion revealed from its light echo spectrum
• Scattered-Light Echoes from the Historical Galactic Supernovae Cassiopeia A and Tycho (SN 1572)
• Shock-Cloud Interaction in the Southwestern Rim of RX J1713.7$-$3946 Evidenced by Chandra X-ray Observations
• Low-frequency radio absorption in Tycho's supernova remnant

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• The 3-D X-ray Ejecta Structure of Tycho's Supernova Remnant
• A Third Epoch Proper Motion Study of The Forward Shock in Kepler's Supernova Remnant
• Discovery of Year-Scale Time Variability from Thermal X-ray Emission in Tycho's Supernova Remnant
• X-ray polarization in SN 1006 southwest shows spatial variations and differences with the radio band
• Estimating Global Ejecta Mass Ratios in Tycho's SNR
• Measurement of the Forward Shock Velocities of the Supernova Remnant N132D Based on the Thermal X-ray Emission