A Melody in the Noise: Modeling Echoes of the Crab Nebula

Abstract Pulses from the Crab pulsar are often followed by “echoes,” produced by radiation that was deflected by structures in the Crab Nebula and thus traveled via longer paths. We describe a simplified but detailed model that treats the structures as cylindrical filaments of dense, neutral material with a thin ionized skin. In this picture, echoes are produced when the line of sight crosses the skin at glancing incidence, which naturally leads to the large electron column density gradients required to get the observed delays even with electron densities comparable to those inferred from optical line emission ratios. We compare the properties of the predicted echoes with those of a relatively isolated observed one identified during daily monitoring with Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. We find that the delays of the simulated echoes follow closely the near-quadratic evolution known to be a feature of these echoes, and that, unlike in previous models, we match the characteristic observed asymmetry between incoming and outgoing arcs, with the size of the gap in between a consequence of the skin crossing time. However, our model fails to quantitatively reproduce the magnifications of the echoes. We believe this likely is because the structures are not as smooth as envisaged, so that a given echo results from many images. Nevertheless, our results confirm that echoes are produced by sheetlike structures seen edge on and support the hypothesis that the nebula is filled with small-scale filamentary structures, which may well be substructures of the larger filaments that are seen in optical images.