| 21st of March 2019 |
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| S-PASS/ATCA survey |
| (by Schnitzeler et al.) |
|
Schnitzeler et al. have recently presented S-PASS/ATCA, the first wide-band
radio polarimetry survey of compact sources in the Southern sky.
Targets were selected from the Parkes S-PASS survey and followed
up with wideband (1.3 to 3.1 GHz) observations with the Australia
Telescope Compact Array (ATCA).
The sample
contains more than 3800 sightlines, and has an angular resolution
of ∼1–2 arcmin: about the same as the number of stars that can be seen
by the naked eye on a clear night, and the angular resolution of
the human eye, respectively. The targets were observed in less
than 90 h in total, using a new observing strategy developed for the ATCA.
Where there is overlap, the Rotation Measures derived from the survey show good agreement
with those published previously.
Sources with large RMs are found mostly close to the Galactic Plane and towards bright H II regions, and are rare elsewhere. It is found that most sightlines are dominated by emission at a single RM, indicating that RMs that have been derived in the past based on narrow-band observations are largely correct. The paper is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. |