Paper detail

Fermi Large Area Telescope Observations of the Fast-dimming Crab Nebula in 60-600 MeV

Context: The Crab pulsar and its nebula are the origin of relativistic electrons which can be observed through their synchrotron and inverse Compton emission. The transition between synchrotron-dominated and inverse-Compton-dominated emissions takes place at $\approx 10^9$ eV. Aims: The short-term (weeks to months) flux variability of the synchrotron emission from the most energetic electrons is investigated with data from ten years of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the energy range from 60 MeV to 600 MeV. Methods: The off-pulse light-curve has been reconstructed from phase-resolved data. The corresponding histogram of flux measurements is used to identify distributions of flux-states and the statistical significance of a lower-flux component is estimated with dedicated simulations of mock light-curves. The energy spectra for different flux states are reconstructed. Results: We confirm the presence of flaring-states which follow a log-normal flux distribution. Additionally, we discover a low-flux state where the flux drops to as low as 18.4% of the intermediate-state average flux and stays there for several weeks. The transition time is observed to be as short as 2 days. The energy spectrum during the low-flux state resembles the extrapolation of the inverse-Compton spectrum measured at energies beyond several GeV energy, implying that the high-energy part of the synchrotron emission is dramatically depressed. Conclusions: The low-flux state found here and the transition time of at most 10 days indicate that the bulk ($>75$%) of the synchrotron emission above $10^8$ eV originates in a compact volume with apparent angular size of $θ\approx0.4" t_\mathrm{var}/(5 \mathrm{d})$. We tentatively infer that the so-called inner knot feature is the origin of the bulk of the $γ$-ray emission.