Investigating CXOU J163802.6-471358: A New Pulsar Wind Nebula in the Norma Region?

We present the first analysis of the extended source CXOU J163802.6-471358, which was discovered serendipitously during the Chandra X-ray survey of the Norma region of the Galactic spiral arms. The X-ray source exhibits a cometary appearance with a point source and an extended tail region. The complete source spectrum is fitted well with an absorbed power law model and jointly fitting the Chandra spectrum of the full source with one obtained from an archived XMM-Newton observation results in best fit parameters N _H =1.5^{+0.7}_{-0.5}\times 10^{23}\, cm{^{-2}} and \Gamma =1.1^{+0.7}_{-0.6} (90% confidence uncertainties). The unabsorbed luminosity of the full source is then L_X\sim 4.8\times 10^{33}d_{10}^2 erg s^-1 with d ₁₀ = d/10 kpc, where a distance of 10 kpc is a lower bound inferred from the large column density. The radio counterpart found for the source using data from the Molonglo Galactic Plane Survey epoch-2 shows an elongated tail offset from the X-ray emission. No infrared counterpart was found. The results are consistent with the source being a previously unknown pulsar driving a bow shock through the ambient medium.