Exploring the circumstellar environment of Tycho's supernova remnant. II. Impact on the broadband non-thermal emission

Abstract

While the environment around Tycho's supernova remnant (SNR) has long been believed to be close to homogeneous, the latest analysis of Chandra data has identified a substantial deceleration of the forward shock which poses a major challenges to this picture. arXiv:2310.14841 showed that the existence of dense molecular cloud (MC) surrounding a rarefied wind-like circumstellar matter (CSM) can explain this observational finding in term of the shock-expansion dynamics, supporting the so-called single-degenerate scenario for the progenitor system. We here extend this work to study the non-thermal emission processes and investigate whether such an environment is consistent with the observed multi-wavelength spectrum. While the simulated broadband spectrum based on the wind-MC environment is largely consistent with observations, we find that such an environment predicts a harder gamma-ray spectrum than observed due to the relatively low CSM density in the cavity interior of the MC. This difference can be at least partially attributed to the present one-dimensional setup of the model which does not account for the clumpy and multi-dimensional structure of the CSM. Our model provides predictions for the long-term evolution of the broadband spectrum which can be used to further probe Tycho's surrounding environment in the future, a key to resolving the long-standing issue of type Ia supernova progenitor channels.

Comments: 10 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJ