Disentangling multiple high-energy emission components in the Vela X pulsar wind nebula with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Understand

Vela X is a pulsar wind nebula in which two relativistic particle populations with distinct spatial and spectral distributions dominate the emission at different wavelengths.

• An extended $2^\circ \times 3^\circ$ nebula is seen in radio and GeV gamma rays.
• An elongated cocoon prevails in X-rays and TeV gamma rays.
• We use 9.5 years of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) to disentangle gamma-ray emission from the two components in the energy range from 10 GeV to 2 TeV, bridging the gap between previous measurements at GeV and TeV energies.