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J. Vink (Columbia University), J. A. M. Bleeker, J .S. Kaastra (SRON, Utrecht, The Netherlands), A. Rasmussen (Columbia University)
We will present XMM-Newton observations of the oxygen rich supernova remnant G292.0+1.8 (MSH11-5{\it4}). Chandra recently found that this remnant contains a pulsar with a small pulsar wind nebula, whereas metal abundances show it to be the remnant of a massive star. This remnant may therefore prove important for shedding light on the question of what types of stars produce pulsars.
The XMM-Newton CCD spectra are of high quality, but in addition, the spatial extent of the remnant is small enough (8 arcmin), to obtain high quality spectra with the Reflective Grating Spectrometer (RGS) in first and second order. Although the RGS spectral resolution is degraded due to the extent of the object, the dispersion direction is perpendicular to the prominent central bar-like structure, thus we are still able to resolve the forbidden line transition of O~VII He\alpha. This puts useful spectroscopic constraints on the allowed temperature/ionization timescale parameter space. In addition the Fe L line emission can be separated from O~VIII and Ne~IX line emission, and meaningful upper limits can be placed on possible Doppler line broadening and line shifts, which constrains bulk velocities and broadening to be less than ~2000~km/s, consistent with published optical spectroscopy.
This work is supported by the NASA through Chandra Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Number PF0-10011 issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-39073.
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,
35#2
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.