Astrophysics

We report on multi-frequency radio observations of the new magnetar Swift J1818.0-1607, following it for more than one month with high cadence. The observations commenced less than 35 hours after its registered first outburst. We obtained timing, polarisation and spectral information. Swift J1818.0-1607 has an unusually steep spectrum for a radio emitting magnetar and also has a relatively narrow and simple pulse profile. The position angle swing of the polarisation is flat over the pulse profile, possibly suggesting that our line-of-sight grazes the edge of the emission beam. This may also explain the steep spectrum. The spin evolution shows large variation in the spin-down rate, associated with four distinct timing events over the course of our observations. Those events may be related to the appearance and disappearance of a second pulse component. The first timing event coincides with our actual observations, while we did not detect significant changes in the emission properties which could reveal further magnetospheric changes. Characteristic ages inferred from the timing measurements over the course of months vary by nearly an order of magnitude. A longer-term spin-down measurement over approximately 100 days suggests an characteristic age of about 500 years, larger than previously reported. Though Swift J1818.0-1607 could still be one of the youngest neutron stars (and magnetars) detected so far, we caution using the characteristic age as a true-age indicator given the caveats behind its calculation.

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) taking place in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are different from ordinary TDEs. In these events, the returning tidal debris stream drills through the pre-existing AGN accretion disk near the stream pericenter, destroying the inner disk in the process, and then intersects with the disk a second time at radii ranging from a few to hundreds of times the pericenter distance. The debris dynamics of such TDEs, and hence their appearance, are distinct from ordinary TDEs. Here we explore the observational signatures of this "second impact" of the stream with the disk. Strong shocks form as the dilute stream is stopped by the denser disk. Compton cooling of the shocked material produces hard X-rays, even soft gamma-rays, with most of the energy emitted between ~10 keV and 1 MeV. The luminosity follows the mass-return rate, peaking between ~ 10 42 and 10 44 erg/s. The X-ray hardness and the smoothness of the light curve provide possible means for distinguishing the second impact from ordinary AGN flares, which exhibit softer spectra and more irregular light curves.

SN2017hcc was remarkable for being a nearby and strongly polarized superluminous TypeIIn supernova (SN). We obtained high-resolution echelle spectra that we combine with other spectra to investigate its line profile evolution. All epochs reveal narrow P~Cygni components from pre-shock circumstellar material (CSM), indicating an axisymmetric outflow from the progenitor of 40-50 km/s. Intermediate-width and broad components exhibit the classic evolution seen in luminous SNe~IIn: symmetric Lorentzian profiles from pre-shock CSM lines broadened by electron scattering at early times, transitioning at late times to multi-component, irregular profiles coming from the SN ejecta and post-shock shell. As in many SNe~IIn, profiles show a progressively increasing blueshift, with a clear flux deficit in red wings of the intermediate and broad velocity components after day 200. This blueshift develops after the continuum luminosity fades, and in the intermediate-width component, persists at late times even after the SN ejecta fade. In SN2017hcc, the blueshift cannot be explained as occultation by the SN photosphere, pre-shock acceleration of CSM, or a lopsided explosion or CSM. Instead, the blueshift arises from dust formation in the post-shock shell and in the SN ejecta. The effect has a wavelength dependence characteristic of dust, exhibiting an extinction law consistent with large grains. Thus, SN2017hcc experienced post-shock dust formation and had a mildly bipolar CSM shell, similar to SN2010jl. Like other superluminous SNeIIn, the progenitor lost around 10Msun due to extreme eruptive mass loss in the decade before exploding.

Supernova remnants (SNRs) are observable for about 6-15x10^4 years before they fade into the Galactic interstellar medium. With a Galactic supernova rate of approximately two per century, we can expect to have of the order of 1200 SNRs in our Galaxy. However, only about 300 of them are known to date, with the majority having been discovered in Galactic plane radio surveys. Given that these SNRs represent the brightest tail of the distribution and are mostly located close to the plane, they are not representative of the complete sample. Here we report findings from the search for new SNRs in the eROSITA all-sky survey data which led to the detection of one of the largest SNRs discovered at wavelengths other than the radio: G249.5+24.5. This source is located at a relatively high Galactic latitude, where SNRs are not usually expected to be found. The remnant, 'Hoinga', has a diameter of about 4.4 degrees and shows a circular shaped morphology with diffuse X-ray emission filling almost the entire remnant. Spectral analysis of the remnant emission reveals that an APEC spectrum from collisionally ionised diffuse gas and a plane-parallel shock plasma model with non-equilibrium ionisation are both able to provide an adequate description of the data, suggesting a gas temperature of the order of kT = 0.1 keV and an absorbing column density of N_H=3.6 x 10^20 cm^-2. Subsequent searches for a radio counterpart of the Hoinga remnant identified its radio emission in archival data from the Continuum HI Parkes All-Sky Survey (CHIPASS) and the 408-MHz `Haslam' all-sky survey. The radio spectral index alpha=-0.69 +- 0.08 obtained from these data definitely confirms the SNR nature of Hoinga. From its size and X-ray and radio spectral properties we conclude that Hoinga is a middle-aged Vela-like SNR located at a distance of about twice that of the Vela SNR, i.e. at ~500 pc.

Gravitational wave observations can be used to accurately measure the Hubble constant H 0 and could help understand the present discrepancy between constraints from Type Ia supernovae and the cosmic microwave background. Neutron star mergers are primarily used for this purpose as their electromagnetic emission can be used to greatly reduce measurement uncertainties. Here we estimate H 0 using the recently observed black hole merger GW190521 and its candidate electromagnetic counterpart found by ZTF using a highly eccentric explanation of the properties of GW190521. We find that the reconstructed distance of GW190521 and the redshift of the candidate host galaxy are more consistent with standard cosmology for our eccentric model than if we reconstruct the source parameters assuming no eccentricity. We obtain H 0 = 88.6 +17.1 −34.3 \,km\,s −1 Mpc −1 for GW190521, and H 0 = 73.4 +6.9 −10.7 \,km\,s −1 Mpc −1 in combination with the results of the neutron star merger GW170817. Our results indicate that future H 0 computations using black hole mergers will need to account for possible eccentricity. For extreme cases, the orbital velocity of binaries in AGN disks can represent a significant systematic uncertainty.

We outline the science opportunities in the areas of searches for dark matter and new physics offered by a proposed future MeV gamma-ray telescope, the Galactic Explorer with a Coded Aperture Mask Compton Telescope (GECCO). We point out that such an instrument would play a critical role in opening up a discovery window for particle dark matter with mass in the MeV or sub-MeV range, in disentangling the origin of the mysterious 511 keV line emission in the Galactic Center region, and in potentially discovering Hawking evaporation from light primordial black holes.

We study quark-hadron hybrid stars with sharp phase transitions assuming that phase conversions at the interface are slow. Hadronic matter is described by a set of equations of state (EoS) based on the chiral effective field theory and quark matter by a generic bag model. Due to slow conversions at the interface, there is an extended region of stable hybrid stars with central densities above the density of the maximum mass star. We explore systematically the role of the transition pressure and the energy-density jump Δϵ at the interface on some global properties of hybrid stars. We find that for a given transition pressure, the radius of the last stable hybrid star decreases as Δϵ raises resulting in a larger extended branch of stable hybrid stars. Contrary to purely hadronic stars, the tidal deformability Λ can be either a decreasing or an increasing function of the stellar mass M and for large values of the transition pressure has a very weak dependence on M . Finally, we analyze the tidal deformabilities Λ 1 and Λ 2 for a binary system with the same chirp mass as GW170817. In the scenario where at least one of the stars in the binary is hybrid, we find that models with low enough transition pressure are inside the 90% credible region of GW170817. However, these models have maximum masses below 2 M ⊙ , in disagreement with observations. We also find that the LIGO/Virgo constrain (at 90% level) and the 2 M ⊙ requirement can be simultaneously fulfilled in a scenario where all hybrid configurations have masses larger than 1.6 M ⊙ and the hadronic EoS is not too stiff, such as several of our hybrid models involving a hadronic EoS of intermediate stiffness. In such scenario hybrid stars may exist in Nature but both objects in GW170817 were hadronic stars.

Neutron stars are the densest objects in the Universe, with M∼1.4 M ⊙ and R∼12 km, and the equation of state associated to their internal composition is still unknown. The extreme conditions to which matter is subjected inside neutron stars could lead to a phase transition in their inner cores, giving rise to a hybrid compact object. The observation of 2 M ⊙ binary pulsars (PSR~J1614-2230, PSR~J0343 + 0432 and PSR~J0740 + 6620) strongly constraints theoretical models of the equation of state. Moreover, the detection of gravitational waves emitted during the binary neutron star merger, GW170817, and its electromagnetic counterpart, GRB170817A, impose additional constraints on the tidal deformability. In this work, we investigate hybrid stars with sequential phase transitions hadron-quark-quark in their cores. We assume that both phase transitions are sharp and analyse the rapid and slow phase conversion scenarios. For the outer core, we use modern hadronic equations of state. For the inner core we employ the constant speed of sound parametrization for quark matter. We analyze more than 3000 hybrid equations of state, taking into account the recent observational constraints from neutron stars. The effects of hadron-quark-quark phase transitions on the normal oscillation modes f and g , are studied under the Cowling relativistic approximation. Our results show that, in the slow conversion regime, a second quark-quark phase transition gives rise to a new g 2 ~mode. We discuss the observational implications of our results associated to the gravitational waves detection and the possibility of detecting hints of sequential phase transitions and the associated g 2 ~mode.

AGN are among the most energetic phenomena in the Universe and in the last two decades INTEGRAL's contribution in their study has had a significant impact. Thanks to the INTEGRAL extragalactic sky surveys, all classes of soft X-ray detected (in the 2-10 keV band) AGN have been observed at higher energies as well. Up to now, around 450 AGN have been catalogued and a conspicuous part of them are either objects observed at high-energies for the first time or newly discovered AGN. The high-energy domain (20-200 keV) represents an important window for spectral studies of AGN and it is also the most appropriate for AGN population studies, since it is almost unbiased against obscuration and therefore free of the limitations which affect surveys at other frequencies. Over the years, INTEGRAL data have allowed to characterise AGN spectra at high energies, to investigate their absorption properties, to test the AGN unification scheme and to perform population studies. In this review the main results are reported and INTEGRAL's contribution to AGN science is highlighted for each class of AGN. Finally, new perspectives are provided, connecting INTEGRAL's science with that at other wavelengths and in particular to the GeV/TeV regime which is still poorly explored.

IceCube has performed several all-sky searches for point-like neutrino sources using track-like events, including a recent time-integrated analysis using 10 years of IceCube data. This paper accompanies the public data release of these neutrino candidates detected by IceCube between April 6, 2008 and July 8, 2018. The selection includes through-going tracks, primarily due to muon neutrino candidates, that reach the detector from all directions, as well as neutrino track events that start within the instrumented volume. An updated selection and reconstruction for data taken after April 2012 slightly improves the sensitivity of the sample. While more than 80% of the sample overlaps between the old and new versions, differing events can lead to changes relative to the previous 7 year event selection. An a posteriori estimate of the significance of the 2014-2015 TXS flare is reported with an explanation of observed discrepancies with previous results. This public data release, which includes 10 years of data and binned detector response functions for muon neutrino signal events, shows improved sensitivity in generic time-integrated point source analyses and should be preferred over previous releases.