The nature of the mysterious space object has been revealed

An international group of astronomers has revealed the supposed nature of the mysterious cosmic radiation source of very high energy 2FHL J1745.1-3035, which can be generated by pulsar wind. The results of the study are published on the arXiv preprint server.

2FHL J1745.1-3035 (J1745.1), located near the center of the Galaxy, is the second brightest in gamma rays among 12 unexplained sources of very high energy in the second Fermi-LAT (2FHL) catalog. Previous observations have shown that this space object has a hard spectrum in gamma rays above 50 gigaelectronvolts and is a wave emitter with an energy of tetraelectronvolts.

The researchers analyzed archived data from NASA's Chandra and NuSTAR spacecraft, as well as from ESA's XMM-Newton satellite. It turned out that the source in the X-rays looks compact and shows no signs of expansion. Nevertheless, Chandra was able to see that the radiation was coming from a small area measuring five arcseconds.

It is assumed that 2FHL J1745.1-3035 is a powerful pulsar wind nebula (PWN). The stellar wind from the pulsar, consisting of charged particles, collides with the environment surrounding the pulsar, in particular with the slowly expanding remnants of a supernova, as a result of which the entire nebula begins to emit high-energy radiation.