SwiftXRT Follow‐up Observations of TeV Sources of the HESS Inner Galaxy Survey

In order to provide a firm identification of the newly discovered GalacticTeV sources, a search for counterparts in a broad band from soft X-ray to softgamma-rays is crucial as data in these wavebands allow us to distinguishbetween different types of suggested models (for example leptonic versushadronic) and, in turn, to disentangle their nature. In this paper, we reportthe results of a set of follow-up observations performed by the Swift/X-RayTelescope (XRT) on seven sources recently discovered by HESS, in the range fromfew hundred GeV to about 10 TeV, during the inner Galaxy survey (Aharonian etal. 2006). In all, but one case, we detect X-ray sources inside or close-by theextended TeV emitting region. All these putative X-ray counterparts haveaccurate arc-second location and are consistent with being point sources. Themain result of our search is the discovery that three of them are located atthe center of the diffuse radio emission of the supernova remnants, which havebeen spatially associated to these TeV objects. HESS J1640-465, HESS J1834-087and HESS J1813-178 show this evidence, suggestive of a possible Pulsar WindNebula association.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication on The Astrophysical Journa