POSSUM Busy Week

Polarization Sky Survey of the Universe's Magnetism (POSSUM) is one of ASKAP's planned survey projects. POSSUM's primary goal is to develop the world's largest "RM Grid", a dense catalog of the Faraday Rotation Measures of polarized radio galaxies in the distant Universe.

POSSUM's RM Grid will be used to study and understand the polarized galaxies themselves, as well as probing the magnetic fields of intervening objects such as galaxies, clusters, and our own Milky Way.

A POSSUM Busy Week was held at ATNF Marsfield last month and attended in person by over a dozen researchers, including two from overseas, as well as about ten researchers who joined via videocon for portions of the workshop.

The main goal of the Busy Week was to understand the polarimetric opportunities provided by the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS), which promises to make extremely efficient use of ASKAP's survey speed to generate what will already be the world's best polarization catalog, not to be surpassed until POSSUM itself claims the crown. Along the way we learned a lot about the detailed systematics of ASKAP's performance and worked to quantify their effects on the science data that we are already collecting. We also had discussions about ATCA's QUOCKA survey, CASDA, EMU, the forthcoming POSSUM Pilot Survey, and common science interests with the VAST Survey.

(Image credit: Dave McCoonnell)