Ain't No Crab, PWN Got A Brand New Bag: Correlated radio and X-ray Structures in Pulsar Wind Nebulae

Abstract

The traditional view of radio pulsar wind nebulae (PWN), encouraged by the Crab nebula's X-ray and radio morphologies, is that they are a result of the integrated history of their pulsars' wind. The radio emission should therefore be largely unaffected by recent pulsar activity, and hence minimally correlated with structures in the X-ray nebulae. Observations of several PWN, both stationary (sPWN) and rapidly moving (rPWN), now show clear morphological relationships between structures in the radio and X-ray with radio intensity variations on the order of unity. We present high-resolution X-ray and radio images of several PWN of both types and discuss the morphological relationships between the two wavebands.