OVII and Temperature Limits on the Local Hot Bubble
Abstract
The observed ¼-keV (ROSAT R12 band) X-ray background originates largely in a region of hot ionized gas roughly 100 pc in extent surrounding the Sun known as the Local Hot Bubble (LHB). The observed flux is quite uniform at low latitudes (|b| < 30°), but there a several large areas at intermediate and high latitudes that are enhanced by factors of 2 - 3. Charge exchange between highly charged ions in the Solar wind and interstellar neutral H and He moving through interplanetary space might provide a very roughly isotropic contribution about equal to the low- latitude flux (Koutroumpa et al. 2008), but cannot produce the enhancements. Correlations with the interstellar absorbing column show that some of these bright regions are apparently due to clumps of hot gas in the Galactic halo, while many of them show no correlation and must be due to extensions of the LHB (Kuntz & Snowden 2000, Bellm & Vaillancourt 2005). Global fits of simple plasma emission spectra give temperatures near 1.0 x 106 K for both LHB and halo emission, but the possibility of a substantial contamination by charge exchange could distort this result in unknown ways. Thermal excitation of O VII is strongly temperature dependent in this range, so we have tried to correlate O VII fluxes measured with Suzaku with variations in ¼-keV intensity from the ROSAT R12 band map to determine the temperature. We take eleven O VII intensity measurements from Yoshino et al. (2009), one from Masui et al. (2009), and an additional eighteen from archival Suzaku pointings and correlate these with the R12 band local and halo intensities as separated by Kunzt & Snowden (2000). The lack of detectable correlation in both cases strongly limits any O VII production by the material producing the enhancements, and upper limits to the temperatures are set. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation's REU program through NSF Award AST-1004881 and by NASA grant NNX09AF09G. *present address: Department of Physics, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation's REU program through NSF Award AST-1004881.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #221
- Pub Date:
- January 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AAS...22134938P