J/A+A/705/A107 Geminga's pulsar halo search with SRG/ART-XC (Krivonos+, 2026)
A wide field X-ray search for the Geminga's pulsar halo with SRG/ART-XC.
Krivonos R., Manconi S., Arefiev V., Bykov A., Donato F., Filippova E.,
Lutovinov A., Di Mauro M., Mori K., Tkachenko A., Woo J.
<Astron. Astrophys. 705, A107 (2026)>
=2026A&A...705A.107K 2026A&A...705A.107K (SIMBAD/NED BibCode)
ADC_Keywords: Milky Way ; Pulsars ; X-ray sources
Keywords: pulsars: general - Galaxy: general
Abstract:
The searches for the putative large-scale X-ray halo around the
Geminga pulsar have been extensively performed using various narrow
field of view X-ray telescopes. In this paper we present wide-field
scanning observation of Geminga with SRG/ART-XC. Our X-ray analysis
covers a large area of the sky (3.5 by 3.5 degrees) of direct imaging
in the 4-12keV energy band, comparable with the size of expected
Geminga emission, for the first time. The ART-XC observation provides
a highly uniform sky coverage without strong vignetting effects. The
synchrotron X-ray halo flux is predicted from a physical model based
on particle injection, diffusion and cooling over the pulsar's
lifetime, and consistently including the spectral and spatial
properties of the synchrotron X-ray and inverse Compton gamma-ray
emissions. The model is tuned to reproduce existing multi-wavelength
data coming from X-ray upper limits and GeV to TeV gamma ray
observations. After taking into account the high particle background
and its uncertainties, no emission is significantly found in the
assumed source region, and X-ray flux upper limits are derived, which
are less constraining within a factor of three with respect to
existing ones obtained with narrow field of view telescopes and longer
exposure times. Nonetheless, we put direct and independent constraints
on the Geminga's ambient magnetic field strength compatible with other
studies.
Description:
We provide the ART-XC sky image of Geminga in 4-12keV band, which is
a counts image binned in 1-arcminute sky pixel (image.fits). The same
image smoothed with a gaussian kernel using dmimgadapt task from
CIAO-4.15 is given as gauss_adapt.fits file.
Objects:
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RA (2000) DE Designation(s)
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06 33 54.15 +17 46 12.9 Geminga pulsar = PSR J0633+17
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File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
list.dat 159 2 List of fits images (Figure 3)
fits/* . 2 Individual fits images
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: list.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 9 F9.5 deg RAdeg Right Ascension of center (J2000)
10- 18 F9.5 deg DEdeg Declination of center (J2000)
20- 22 I3 --- Nx Number of pixels along X-axis
24- 26 I3 --- Ny Number of pixels along Y-axis
28- 46 A19 "datime" Obs.date Observation date
48- 51 I4 Kibyte size Size of FITS file
53- 68 A16 --- FileName Name of FITS file, in subdirectory fits
70-159 A90 --- Title Title of the FITS file
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Acknowledgements:
From Roman Krivonos, krivonos(at)cosmos.ru
The Mikhail Pavlinsky ART-XC telescope is the hard X-ray instrument on
board the SRG observatory, a flagship astrophysical project of the
Russian Federal Space Program realized by the Russian Space Agency in
the interests of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
(End) Patricia Vannier [CDS] 01-Oct-2025