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Session 65 - New Views of the Magellanic Clouds - II.
Oral session, Wednesday, June 12
Historical Society,
The surface brightness - diameter, or alternatively luminosity - diameter relation and other statistical properties of supernova remnants (SNRs) remain ambiguous despite many years of study. The confusion is caused largely by great uncertainties in the distances to supernova remnants in the Milky Way and a large, variable extinction along the Galactic plane. The remnants in the Magellanic Clouds do not suffer from these effects and we now have, for the first time, the opportunity to study the properties and statistical relations of the over 42 SNRs identified in the Magellanic Clouds. X-ray data are from the Rosat, Einstein, and ASCA archives; radio data are primarily from the Australia Telescope Compact Array. With these results we are investigating the relationships between the x-ray and radio luminosiies, the temperatures, and diameters of the SNRs in the Magellanic Clouds. Detailed studies of individual remnants are helping to evaluate the physical causes of the observed relations. The dynamics of the interaction of expanding remnants with their surroundings are also being probed using specific cases of individual SNRs in different circumstellar media.
