A Faraday Rotation Template for the Galactic Sky

Abstract

Using a set of compilations of measurements for extragalactic radio sources we construct all-sky maps of the Faraday Rotation produced by the Galactic magnetic field. In order to generate the maps we treat the radio source positions as a kind of "mask" and construct combinations of spherical harmonic modes that are orthogonal on the masked sky. As long as relatively small multipoles are used the resulting maps are quite stable to changes in selection criteria for the sources, and show clearly the structure of the local Galactic magnetic field. We also suggest the use of these maps as templates for CMB foreground analysis, illustrating the idea with a cross-correlation analysis between the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and our maps. We find a significant cross-correlation, indicating the presence of significant residual contamination.

9 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (20)

• Radio observational constraints on Galactic 3D-emission models
• An improved map of the Galactic Faraday sky
• Simulating polarized Galactic synchrotron emission at all frequencies, the Hammurabi code
• Structures of the magnetoionic media around the FR I radio galaxies 3C 31 and Hydra A
• Structure in the Rotation Measure Sky
• Faraday rotation, stochastic magnetic fields and CMB maps
• Multifrequency observations of the jets in the radio galaxy NGC 315
• The Galactic Faraday depth sky revisited
• A relativistic model of the radio jets in 3C 296
• Structure of the magnetoionic medium around the FR Class I radio galaxy 3C 449
• A compiled catalog of rotation measures of radio point sources
• Polarization shadows of extragalactic sources by the local magneto-ionic ISM
• Faraday Rotation as a diagnostic of Galactic foreground contamination of CMB maps
• The One-dimensional Fourier Representation and Large Angular Scale Foreground Contamination in the 3-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data
• An angular power spectrum analysis of the DRAO 1.4 GHz polarization survey: implications for CMB observations
• The synchrotron foreground and CMB temperature-polarization cross correlation power spectrum from the first year WMAP data
• Secondary B-mode polarization from Faraday rotation in clusters and galaxies
• The Galactic Faraday rotation sky 2020
• Cosmic Magnetism with the Square Kilometre Array and its Pathfinders
• Interpolation techniques for reconstructing Galactic Faraday rotation