Mapping the Magnetic Interstellar Medium in Three Dimensions Over the Full Sky with Neutral Hydrogen
Abstract
Recent analyses of 21-cm neutral hydrogen (HI) emission have demonstrated that HI gas is organized into linear filamentary structures that are preferentially aligned with the local magnetic field, and that the coherence of these structures in velocity space traces line-of-sight magnetic field tangling. On this basis, we introduce a paradigm for modeling the properties of magnetized, dusty regions of the interstellar medium, using the orientation of HI structure at different velocities to map "magnetically coherent" regions of space. We construct three-dimensional (position-position-velocity) Stokes parameter maps using HI4PI full-sky spectroscopic HI data. We compare these maps, integrated over the velocity dimension, to Planck maps of the polarized dust emission at 353 GHz. Without any free parameters governing the relation between HI intensity and dust emission, we find that our and maps are highly correlated () with the 353 GHz and maps of polarized dust emission observed by Planck and reproduce many of its large-scale features. The ratio of the dust emission maps agrees well with the HI-derived maps at large angular scales (), supporting the interpretation that this asymmetry arises from the coupling of linear density structures to the Galactic magnetic field. We demonstrate that our 3D Stokes parameter maps constrain the 3D structure of the Galactic interstellar medium and the orientation of the interstellar magnetic field.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1909.11673,
title = {Mapping the Magnetic Interstellar Medium in Three Dimensions Over the Full Sky with Neutral Hydrogen},
author = {S. E. Clark and Brandon S. Hensley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11673},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
27 pages, 17 figures. Three-dimensional HI-based Stokes maps will be made public upon publication. If you are interested in using the maps beforehand, please contact us