| 10th of December 2019 |
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| Fresh Science |
| by Charlotte Sobey |
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This year I was selected to participate in Fresh Science - a national
competition helping early-career researchers find, and then share,
their stories of discovery. This included a two-day media training
course and practice interviews with journalists from TV, radio, and
print media. We concluded with the 'pub test', where I explained my
work in the time it took for a birthday sparkler to burn out
(image above, left), followed by some questions.
I focussed on a paper published earlier this year that I led, which presented the most precise catalogue of Faraday rotation measures (RMs) towards mapping our Galaxy’s magnetic field in 3-D, and provided an estimate of the Galactic halo magnetic field scale height (Sobey et al. 2019). You can read more about this on CSIROscope and the Fresh Science website. The research paper can be accessed from ADS Sobey et al. 2019. The image above shows on the right the 'Faraday sky' - how the sky would look if we could see magnetic fields. The plane of the Galaxy runs horizontally through the middle of the map, and the Galactic centre direction is in the middle. Red–pink colours show increasing Galactic magnetic field strengths where the direction is pointing towards the Earth. Blue–purple colours show increasing Galactic magnetic field strengths where the direction is pointing away from the Earth. The background shows the signal reconstructed using sources outside our Galaxy. The points show the current measurements for pulsars. The squares show the measurements from Sobey et al. 2019 using LOFAR pulsar observations. |