Q. Daniel Wang, Stefan Immler, Rene Walterbos, James T. Lauroesch, Dieter Breitschwerdt
Published 2001-05-30Version 1
We present a Chandra X-ray observation that shows, unambiguously for the first time, the presence of a giant diffuse X-ray-emitting corona around the edge-on disk galaxy NGC 4631. This corona, with a characteristic thermal temperature of 2-7\times10^6 K, extends as far as 8 kpc away from the galactic plane. The X-ray morphology resembles the radio halo of the galaxy, indicating a close connection between outflows of hot gas, cosmic rays, and magnetic field from the galactic disk. Enhanced diffuse X-ray emission is apparently enclosed by numerous H\alpha-emitting loops blistered out from the central disk of the galaxy, as is evident in a comparison with our deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging.
Comments: 3 pages, 8 figures. To appear in ApJ Letters. Full resolution version available at http://xray.astro.umass.edu/n4631.ps.gz
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