Magnetic fields in the Southern Galactic Plane Survey

Abstract

The Southern Galactic Plane Survey (SGPS) is a 1.4 GHz radio polarization and HI survey in a large part of the inner Galactic plane at a resolution of about an arcmin. Depolarization and Faraday rotation of polarized radiation from diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission, pulsars, and extragalactic sources can be used to infer information about the strength and structure of the Galactic magnetic field. Here, we discuss science results of the polarization data from the SGPS. We show from statistical analysis of rotation measures of polarized extragalactic sources that fluctuations in the magneto-ionized medium of the spiral arms are probably mainly caused by HII regions, while the rotation measure fluctuations in the interarm regions may be connected to the interstellar turbulent cascade. Furthermore, the variations of rotation measure with Galactic longitude enable modeling of the large-scale component of the Galactic magnetic field, including determination of the number and location of magnetic field reversals. Finally, the SGPS is an excellent way to study subparsec-scale structure in the ionized ISM by way of depolarization studies in HII regions.

to appear in proceedings for the conference "The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Magnetic Fields", eds R. Beck, G. Brunetti, L. Feretti, and B. Gaensler

References in corpus (7)

• The Southern Galactic Plane Survey: HI Observations and Analysis
• Galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields
• Radio polarization from the inner Galaxy at arcminute resolution
• Magnetic Fields and Ionized Gas in the inner Galaxy: An Outer Scale for Turbulence and the Possible Role of HII Regions
• Structure in the polarized Galactic synchrotron emission, in particular `depolarization canals'
• Properties of the warm magnetized ISM, as inferred from WSRT polarimetric imaging
• HI Emission and Absorption in the Southern Galactic Plane Survey

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Southern Galactic Plane Survey: Polarized Radio Continuum Observations and Analysis
• The effects of cosmic rays on the formation of Milky Way-mass galaxies in a cosmological context
• Interacting Large-Scale Magnetic Fields and Ionised Gas in the W50/SS433 System
• Heightened Faraday Complexity in the inner 1 kpc of the Galactic Centre
• Turbulent magnetic field in the HII region Sh 2-27