The putative pulsar-wind nebulae of the three Musketeers PSR B1055-52, B0656+14 and Geminga revisited

Abstract

We report on the analysis of archival ASCA, ROSAT and BeppoSAX data of PSR B1055-52, PSR B0656+14 and Geminga, performed in order to investigate the reality of the putative ~10-20 arcmin wide X-ray pulsar-wind nebulae recently proposed to exist around these pulsars. In all these cases, the ROSAT and/or BeppoSAX data show that the diffuse and clumpy X-ray nebulae found by ASCA can be resolved in the contribution of unidentified point sources, unlikely related to the pulsars.

accepted for publication in A & A, 12 figures mostly in color, a version of the paper with higher quality figures is available from ftp://ftp.xray.mpe.mpg.de/people/web/neb_pap.ps.gz