Measurement of temperature relaxation in the postshock plasma of the northwestern limb of SN 1006

Abstract

Heating of charged particles via collisionless shocks, while ubiquitous in the universe, is an intriguing yet puzzling plasma phenomenon. One outstanding question is how electrons and ions approach an equilibrium after they were heated to different immediate-postshock temperatures. In order to fill the significant lack of observational information of the downstream temperature-relaxation process, we observe a thermal-dominant X-ray filament in the northwest of SN 1006 with Chandra. We divide this region into four layers with a thickness of $15^{\prime \prime }$ or $0.16\:$pc each, and fit each spectrum by a non-equilibrium ionization collisional plasma model. The electron temperature was found to increase toward downstream from 0.52–0.62 to 0.82–$0.95\:$keV on a length scale of $60^{\prime \prime }$ (or $0.64\:$pc). This electron temperature is lower than thermal relaxation processes via Coulomb scattering, requiring some other effects such as plasma mixture due to turbulence and/or projection effects, etc., which we hope will be resolved with future X-ray calorimeter missions such as XRISM and Athena.