A study of the composite supernova remnant MSH 15–56 with Suzaku

Abstract

The Galactic supernova remnant (SNR) MSH 15−56 is a member of the class of composite SNRs that consists of the remnant shell and a displaced pulsar wind nebula (PWN). The earlier X-ray observations reported the comet-like morphology of the PWN and the ejecta distribution of the SNR. In this work, we present a study of MSH 15−56 using archival Suzaku data. We investigate the nature of the emission and spectral parameters of the remnant. The X-ray spectra are well fitted with a combination of a thermal and non-thermal model with temperature ∼0.6 keV and photon index ∼2.0. The slightly enhanced abundances of Ne, Mg, S and enhanced abundance of Si confirm the presence of ejected material.