The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry-BLASTPol: Performance and results from the 2012 Antarctic flight

Abstract

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment, designed to study the role played by magnetic fields in the star formation process. BLASTPol observes polarized light using a total power instrument, photolithographic polarizing grids, and an achromatic half-wave plate to modulate the polarization signal. During its second flight from Antarctica in December 2012, BLASTPol made degree scale maps of linearly polarized dust emission from molecular clouds in three wavebands, centered at 250, 350, and 500 microns. The instrumental performance was an improvement over the 2010 BLASTPol flight, with decreased systematics resulting in a higher number of confirmed polarization vectors. The resultant dataset allows BLASTPol to trace magnetic fields in star-forming regions at scales ranging from cores to entire molecular cloud complexes.

arXiv commentPresented at SPIE Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes V, June 23, 2014

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Relative Alignment Between the Magnetic Field and Molecular Gas Structure in the Vela C Giant Molecular Cloud using Low and High Density Tracers
• Submillimeter Polarization Spectrum in the Vela C Molecular Cloud
• First Observation of the Submillimeter Polarization Spectrum in a Translucent Molecular Cloud
• An Imprint of the Galactic Magnetic Field in the Diffuse Unpolarized Dust Emission
• The EBEX Balloon Borne Experiment - Detectors and Readout
• Submillimeter Polarization Spectrum of the Carina Nebula
• Thermal, Structural, and Optical Analysis of a Balloon-Based Imaging System
• Polarised emission from aligned dust grains in nearby galaxies: predictions from the Auriga simulations
• Characterising the Magnetic Fields of Nearby Molecular Clouds using Submillimeter Polarization Observations
• The BLAST Observatory: A Sensitivity Study for Far-IR Balloon-borne Polarimeters
• Interstellar filament detection and characterization: methods and implications for studies of magnetized interstellar medium