On the metal abundances inside mixed-morphology supernova remnants: the
  case of IC443 and G166.0+4.3
  Recent developments on the study of mixed morphology supernova remnants
(MMSNRs) have revealed the presence of metal rich X-ray emitting plasma inside
a fraction of these remnant, a feature not properly addressed by traditional
models for these objects. Radial profiles of thermodynamical and chemical
parameters are needed for a fruitful comparison of data and model of MMSNRs,
but these are available only in a few cases. We analyze XMM-Newton data of two
MMSNRs, namely IC443 and G166.0+4.3, previously known to have solar metal
abundances, and we perform spatially resolved spectral analysis of the X-ray
emission. We detected enhanced abundances of Ne, Mg and Si in the hard X-ray
bright peak in the north of IC443, and of S in the outer regions of G166.0+4.3.
The metal abundances are not distributed uniformly in both remnants. The
evaporating clouds model and the radiative SNR model fail to reproduce
consistently all the observational results. We suggest that further deep X-ray
observations of MMSNRs may reveal more metal rich objects. More detailed models
which include ISM-ejecta mixing are needed to explain the nature of this
growing subclass of MMSNRs.
