Daily Image
01-02-2010
Measuring magnetic fields in the inner Milky Way
| Submitter: | Marijke Haverkorn |
| Description: | The study of magnetic fields in the cosmos is receiving increasing interest, now that new telescopes (such as LOFAR) and new analysis techniques are opening windows to a polarized universe that has never been visible before. If one wants to find out what magnetic fields in galaxies look like, the Milky Way is an obvious target: as we are located in the middle of it, we can see details that will never be visible in other, distant, galaxies. This also implicates that, as the Milky Way is all around us, we can only get a holistic view of the whole Galaxy if we observe the entire sky. Such large surveys take up an increasingly important position in observing programs of most, if not all, radio telescopes. One example is STAPS, the Southern Twenty-centimeter All-sky Polarization Survey, which was introduced in the daily image of last friday. Today's image shows synchrotron emission at a frequency of 1336 MHz in the southern sky, obtained with STAPS. The final resolution of the map will be 15 arcmin, twice the resolution shown. Features that can be recognized are e.g. the Galactic plane that runs horizontally through the image, the nearby double-lobed radio galaxy Centaurus A, and the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, our two closest neighbor galaxies. Also, various artifacts due to e.g. missing data or the scanning method are still visible. Work in progress! |
| Copyright: | Haverkorn, Carretti, Gaensler, Heiles, Kesteven, McClure-Griffiths, McConnell, Wolleben |
| Tweet |  |