An improved map of the Galactic Faraday sky

By N. Oppermann, H. Junklewitz, G. Robbers, M. Bell, Torsten A. Ensslin, A. Bonafede, R. Braun, J. Brown, T. Clarke, I. Feain and 21 more. 2011

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We aim to summarize the current state of knowledge regarding Galactic Faraday rotation in an all-sky map of the Galactic Faraday depth. For this we have assembled the most extensive catalog of Faraday rotation data of compact extragalactic polarized radio sources to date. In the map-making procedure we used a recently developed algorithm that reconstructs the map and the power spectrum of a statistically isotropic and homogeneous field while taking into account uncertainties in the noise statistics. This procedure is able to identify some rotation angles that are offset by an integer multiple of π. The resulting map can be seen as an improved version of earlier such maps and is made publicly available, along with a map of its uncertainty. For the angular power spectrum we find a power law behavior C� ∝ � −2.17 for a Faraday sky where an overall variance profile as a function of Galactic latitude has been removed, in agreement with earlier work. We show that this is in accordance with a 3D Fourier power spectrum P(k) ∝ k −2.17 of the underlying

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c009f730d2b18b0efae0c951f3576bbf4ba69dd

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Citations in the corpus

A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, methodology): “The Galactic foreground RM prediction in the FRB sight line from the Oppermann et al. (2012) model is −11± 8 rad m−2.”
Estimating extragalactic Faraday rotation (2014, methodology): “(22) solely to observational e ﬀ ects and write Since many of the correction factors derived by Oppermann et al. (2012) are actually smaller than one, the last equation can lead to reduced or even negative error variances.”
PICO: Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (2019, background): “1 nG (1σ ), a precision that already includes the effects of imperfect lensing subtraction, Galactic foregrounds [89–91], and other systematic effects.”
Planck 2015 results. I. Overview of products and scientific results (2015, methodology): “We identify a number of other faint features in the polarized sky, including a dearth of polarized synchrotron emission directly correlated with a narrow, roughly 20◦ long filament seen in Hα at high Galactic latitude, and also visible in the Faraday rotation map of Oppermann et al. (2012). Finally,”