학술논문
Low frequency observations of linearly polarized structures in the interstellar medium near the south Galactic pole
Document Type
Working Paper
Author
Lenc, Emil; Gaensler, B. M.; Sun, X. H.; Sadler, E. M.; Willis, A. G.; Barry, N.; Beardsley, A. P.; Bell, M. E.; Bernardi, G.; Bowman, J. D.; Briggs, F.; Callingham, J. R.; Cappallo, R. J.; Carroll, P.; Corey, B. E.; de Oliveira-Costa, A.; Deshpande, A. A.; Dillon, J. S.; Dwarkanath, K. S.; Emrich, D.; Ewall-Wice, A.; Feng, L.; For, B. -Q.; Goeke, R.; Greenhill, L. J.; Hancock, P.; Hazelton, B. J.; Hewitt, J. N.; Hindson, L.; Hurley-Walker, N.; Johnston-Hollitt, M.; Jacobs, D. C.; Kapinska, A. D.; Kaplan, D. L.; Kasper, J. C.; Kim, H. -S.; Kratzenberg, E.; Line, J.; Loeb, A.; Lonsdale, C. J.; Lynch, M. J.; McKinley, B.; McWhirter, S. R.; Mitchell, D. A.; Morales, M. F.; Morgan, E.; Morgan, J.; Murphy, T.; Neben, A. R.; Oberoi, D.; Offringa, A. R.; Ord, S. M.; Paul, S.; Pindor, B.; Pober, J. C.; Prabu, T.; Procopio, P.; Riding, J.; Rogers, A. E. E.; Roshi, A.; Shankar, N. Udaya; Sethi, S. K.; Srivani, K. S.; Staveley-Smith, L.; Subrahmanyan, R.; Sullivan, I. S.; Tegmark, M.; Thyagarajan, Nithyanandan; Tingay, S. J.; Trott, C.; Waterson, M.; Wayth, R. B.; Webster, R. L.; Whitney, A. R.; Williams, A.; Williams, C. L.; Wu, C.; Wyithe, J. S. B.; Zheng, Q.
Source
Subject
Language
Abstract
We present deep polarimetric observations at 154 MHz with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), covering 625 deg^2 centered on RA=0 h, Dec=-27 deg. The sensitivity available in our deep observations allows an in-band, frequency-dependent analysis of polarized structure for the first time at long wavelengths. Our analysis suggests that the polarized structures are dominated by intrinsic emission but may also have a foreground Faraday screen component. At these wavelengths, the compactness of the MWA baseline distribution provides excellent snapshot sensitivity to large-scale structure. The observations are sensitive to diffuse polarized emission at ~54' resolution with a sensitivity of 5.9 mJy beam^-1 and compact polarized sources at ~2.4' resolution with a sensitivity of 2.3 mJy beam^-1 for a subset (400 deg^2) of this field. The sensitivity allows the effect of ionospheric Faraday rotation to be spatially and temporally measured directly from the diffuse polarized background. Our observations reveal large-scale structures (~1 deg - 8 deg in extent) in linear polarization clearly detectable in ~2 minute snapshots, which would remain undetectable by interferometers with minimum baseline lengths >110 m at 154 MHz. The brightness temperature of these structures is on average 4 K in polarized intensity, peaking at 11 K. Rotation measure synthesis reveals that the structures have Faraday depths ranging from -2 rad m^-2 to 10 rad m^-2 with a large fraction peaking at ~+1 rad m^-2. We estimate a distance of 51+/-20 pc to the polarized emission based on measurements of the in-field pulsar J2330-2005. We detect four extragalactic linearly polarized point sources within the field in our compact source survey. Based on the known polarized source population at 1.4 GHz and non-detections at 154 MHz, we estimate an upper limit on the depolarization ratio of 0.08 from 1.4 GHz to 154 MHz.
Comment: 32 pages, 20 figures, accepted to ApJ
Comment: 32 pages, 20 figures, accepted to ApJ