Detection of the Extended γ-Ray Emission from the High Galactic Latitude Calvera’s SNR Candidate

Abstract

Abstract We report the extended GeV γ-ray emission that is spatially associated with the high Galactic latitude supernova remnant (SNR) candidate—Calvera’s SNR with the Pass 8 data recorded by the Fermi Large Area Telescope. The γ-ray spectrum of Calvera’s SNR between 100 MeV and 1 TeV shows an evident (∼3.4σ) spectral curvature at several tens of GeV. The multiwavelength data can be fitted with either a leptonic model or a hadronic one. However, the leptonic model exhibits inconsistency between the flat radio spectrum and the hard GeV γ-ray spectrum of Calvera’s SNR. For the hadronic model, the spectral index of protons should be harder than 1.6 and the total energy of protons is fitted to be more than one order of magnitude higher than the explosion energy of a typical supernova, which also challenges the hadronic model. The evident spectral curvature and the absence of nonthermal X-ray emission from Calvera’s SNR makes it to be an interesting source bridging young-aged SNRs with bright nonthermal X-ray emission and old-aged SNRs interacting with molecular clouds.