We report on broadband X-ray properties of the Rabbit pulsar wind nebula (PWN) associated with the pulsar PSR J1418−6058 using archival Chandra and XMM-Newton data, as well as a new NuSTAR observation. NuSTAR data above 10 keV allowed us to detect the 110 ms spin period of the pulsar, characterize its hard X-ray pulse profile, and resolve hard X-ray emission from the PWN after removing contamination from the pulsar and other overlapping point sources. The extended PWN was detected up to ∼20 keV and is described well by a power-law model with a photon index Γ ≈ 2. The PWN shape does not vary significantly with energy, and its X-ray spectrum shows no clear evidence of softening away from the pulsar. We modeled the spatial profile of X-ray spectra and broadband spectral energy distribution in the radio to TeV band to infer the physical properties of the PWN. We found that a model with low magnetic field strength (B ∼ 10 μG) and efficient diffusion (D ∼ 1027 cm2 s−1) fits the PWN data well. The extended hard X-ray and TeV emission, associated respectively with synchrotron radiation and inverse Compton scattering by relativistic electrons, suggest that particles are accelerated to very high energies (≳500 TeV), indicating that the Rabbit PWN is a Galactic PeVatron candidate.
We present a detailed analysis of broadband X-ray observations of the pulsar PSR J1420−6048 and its wind nebula (PWN) in the Kookaburra region with Chandra, XMM-Newton, and NuSTAR. Using the archival XMM-Newton and new NuSTAR data, we detected 68 ms pulsations of the pulsar and characterized its X-ray pulse profile, which exhibits a sharp spike and a broad bump separated by ∼0.5 in phase. A high-resolution Chandra image revealed a complex morphology of the PWN: a torus-jet structure, a few knots around the torus, one long (∼7′) and two short tails extending in the northwest direction, and a bright diffuse emission region to the south. Spatially integrated Chandra and NuSTAR spectra of the PWN out to 2.′5 are well-described by a power-law model with a photon index Γ ≈ 2. A spatially resolved spectroscopic study, as well as NuSTAR radial profiles of the 3–7 keV and 7–20 keV brightness, showed a hint of spectral softening with increasing distance from the pulsar. A multiwavelength spectral energy distribution (SED) of the source was then obtained by supplementing our X-ray measurements with published radio, Fermi-LAT, and H.E.S.S. data. The SED and radial variations of the X-ray spectrum were fit with a leptonic multizone emission model. Our detailed study of the PWN may be suggestive of (1) particle transport dominated by advection, (2) a low magnetic-field strength (B ∼ 5 μG), and (3) electron acceleration to ∼PeV energies.
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