The Q/U Imaging Experiment: Polarization Measurements of Radio Sources at 43 and 95 GHz

Abstract

We present polarization measurements of extragalactic radio sources observed during the Cosmic Microwave Background polarization survey of the Q/U Imaging Experiment (QUIET), operating at 43 GHz (Q-band) and 95 GHz (W-band). We examine sources selected at 20 GHz from the public, $>$40 mJy catalog of the Australia Telescope (AT20G) survey. There are $\sim$480 such sources within QUIET's four low-foreground survey patches, including the nearby radio galaxies Centaurus A and Pictor A. The median error on our polarized flux density measurements is 30--40 mJy per Stokes parameter. At S/N $>3$ significance, we detect linear polarization for seven sources in Q-band and six in W-band; only $1.3\pm 1.1$ detections per frequency band are expected by chance. For sources without a detection of polarized emission, we find that half of the sources have polarization amplitudes below 90 mJy (Q-band) and 106 mJy (W-band), at 95% confidence. Finally, we compare our polarization measurements to intensity and polarization measurements of the same sources from the literature. For the four sources with WMAP and Planck intensity measurements $>1$ Jy, the polarization fraction are above 1% in both QUIET bands. At high significance, we compute polarization fractions as much as 10--20% for some sources, but the effects of source variability may cut that level in half for contemporaneous comparisons. Our results indicate that simple models---ones that scale a fixed polarization fraction with frequency---are inadequate to model the behavior of these sources and their contributions to polarization maps.

16 pages, 10 figures. Submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (11)

• Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis
• Placing Confidence Limits on Polarization Measurements
• The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Source Catalog
• A novel estimator of the polarization amplitude from normally distributed Stokes parameters
• The Australia Telescope 20 GHz (AT20G) Survey: The Bright Source Sample
• Second Season QUIET Observations: Measurements of the CMB Polarization Power Spectrum at 95 GHz
• Synchrotron and inverse-Compton emission from blazar jets I: a uniform conical jet model
• The First Simultaneous 3.5 and 1.3mm Polarimetric Survey of Active Galactic Nuclei in the Northern Sky
• Polarization measurements analysis I. Impact of the full covariance matrix on polarization fraction and angle measurements
• Degree of Polarization and Source Counts of Faint Radio Sources from Stacking Polarized Intensity
• Origin of the Counter-Rotating Gas in NGC 1596

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Simons Observatory: Science goals and forecasts
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Two-season ACTPol Extragalactic Point Sources and their Polarization properties
• Multi-frequency polarimetry of a complete sample of PACO radio sources
• The Q/U Imaging ExperimenT: Polarization Measurements of the Galactic Plane at 43 and 95 GHz
• QUIJOTE scientific results -- IX. Radio sources in the QUIJOTE-MFI wide survey maps
• 28 -- 40 GHz variability and polarimetry of bright compact sources in the QUIJOTE cosmological fields