English

Large scale magnetic field of the Milky Way from WMAP3 data

Astrophysics 2007-08-22 v1

Abstract

We report on initial results from a project to constrain the large-scale and turbulent magnetic fields of the Milky Way galaxy, which eventually will incorporate all of the relevant observational data. In this paper we fit popular large scale magnetic field models to WMAP3 polarization maps. We find that the polarization data can constrain certain model parameters but does not uniquely determine the best-fit parameters. We also find that the polarization data alone cannot distinguish between model symmetries, e.g., the existence of field reversals. We show how future UHECR data can break this degeneracy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0708.2714,
  title  = {Large scale magnetic field of the Milky Way from WMAP3 data},
  author = {Ronnie Jansson and Glennys R. Farrar and Andre Waelkens and Torsten A. Ensslin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0708.2714},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of the 30th ICRC, Merida, Mexico 2007