Additional evidence for a pulsar wind nebula in the heart of SN 1987A from multi-epoch X-ray data and MHD modeling

Understand

Since the day of its explosion, supernova (SN) 1987A has been closely monitored to study its evolution and to detect its central compact relic.

• In fact, the formation of a neutron star is strongly supported by the detection of neutrinos from the SN.
• However, besides the detection in the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) data of a feature that is compatible with the emission arising from a proto-pulsar wind nebula (PWN), the only hint for the existence of such elusive compact object is provided by the detection of hard emission in NuSTAR data up to ~ 20 keV.
• We report on the simultaneous analysis of multi-epoch observations of SN 1987A performed with Chandra, XMM-Newton and NuSTAR.