Searching for Diffuse Nonthermal X-Rays from the Superbubbles N11 and N51D in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

We report on observations of the superbubbles (SBs) N11 and N51D in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) with Suzaku and XMM-Newton. The interior of both SBs exhibits diffuse X-ray emission, which is well represented by thin thermal plasma models with a temperature of 0.2-0.3 keV. The presence of nonthermal emission, claimed in previous works, is much less evident in our careful investigation. The 3σ upper limits of 2-10 keV flux are 3.6 × 10^-14 erg cm^-2 s^-1 and 4.7 × 10^-14 erg cm^-2 s^-1 for N11 and N51D, respectively. The previous claims of the detection of nonthermal emission are probably due to the inaccurate estimation of the non-X-ray background. We conclude that no credible nonthermal emission has been detected from the SBs in the LMC, with the exception of 30 Dor C.