The Origin of Radio Scintillation In the Local Interstellar Medium

Abstract

We study three quasar radio sources (B1257-326, B1519-273, and J1819+385) that show large amplitude intraday and annual scintillation variability produced by the Earth's motion relative to turbulent-scattering screens located within a few parsecs of the Sun. We find that the lines of sight to these sources pass through the edges of partially ionized warm interstellar clouds where two or more clouds may interact. From the gas flow vectors of these clouds, we find that the relative radial and transverse velocities of these clouds are large and could generate the turbulence that is responsible for the observed scintillation. For all three sight lines the flow velocities of nearby warm local interstellar clouds are consistent with the fits to the transverse flows of the radio scintillation signals.

16 pages, 5 figures; Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (2)

• Rapid interstellar scintillation of PKS B1257-326: two-station pattern time delays and constraints on scattering and microarcsecond source structure
• Emergence and disappearance of micro-arcsecond structure in the scintillating quasar J1819+3845

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• Inhomogeneity within Local Interstellar Clouds
• ASKAP observations of multiple rapid scintillators reveal a degrees-long plasma filament
• Tracing Milky Way scattering by compact extragalactic radio sources
• Plasma Turbulence in the Local Bubble
• Intra-day variability observations and the VLBI structure analysis of quasar S4 0917+624
• Report from Sessions 1 and 3, including the Local Bubble Debate
• Compact radio emission from z~0.2 X-ray bright AGN
• Are the heliosphere, very local interstellar medium, and local cavity in pressure balance with Galactic gravity
• Scintillation kinks, bumps and wiggles in the radio spectrum of the quasar PMN J1106-3647
• Revisiting the structure function of PSR B0950+08 scintillations
• Study of the variability and components of the pulsar B0823+26 at a frequency of 111 MHz