Polarization alignments of radio quasars in JVAS/CLASS surveys

Abstract

We test the hypothesis that the polarization vectors of flat-spectrum radio sources (FSRS) in the JVAS/CLASS 8.4-GHz surveys are randomly oriented on the sky. The sample with robust polarization measurements is made of $4155$ objects and redshift information is known for $1531$ of them. We performed two statistical analyses: one in two dimensions and the other in three dimensions when distance is available. We find significant large-scale alignments of polarization vectors for samples containing only quasars (QSO) among the varieties of FSRS's. While these correlations prove difficult to explain either by a physical effect or by biases in the dataset, the fact that the QSO's which have significantly aligned polarization vectors are found in regions of the sky where optical polarization alignments were previously found is striking.

13 pages, 9 figures, submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures
• A compendium of AGN inclinations with corresponding UV/optical continuum polarization measurements
• A survey of polarization in the JVAS/CLASS flat-spectrum radio source surveys: I. The data and catalogue production
• The polarization in the JVAS/CLASS flat-spectrum radio sources: II. A search for aligned radio polarizations

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Is the Observable Universe Consistent with the Cosmological Principle?
• Galaxy alignments: Observations and impact on cosmology
• Forecasting Polarized Radio Sources for CMB observations
• Evidence for the alignment of quasar radio polarizations with large quasar group axes
• Probing statistical isotropy of cosmological radio sources using SKA
• Preferred axis of CMB parity asymmetry in the masked maps
• Evidence of isotropy at large-scale from polarizations of radio sources
• Cosmological-scale coherent orientations of quasar optical polarization vectors in the $Planck$ era Investigating the Galactic dust contamination scenario
• Quasars as a tracer of large-scale structures in the distant universe
• Correlated orientations of the axes of large quasar groups on Gpc scales
• Extracting Spectral Index of Intergalactic Magnetic Field from Radio Polarizations
• Large-scale clustering amongst Fermi blazars; evidence for axis alignments?
• Local alignments of parsec-scale AGN radiojets
• A mechanism to explain Galaxy alignment over a range of scales
• Matter Dipole and Hubble Tension due to Large Wavelength Perturbations
• Spinning Toroidal Brane Cosmology; A Classical and Quantum Survey
• Testing the cosmological principle on gigaparsec scales
• Corroborating pseudoscalar probing model with pulsar polarisation datasets