Observational Evidence Against Birefringence Over Cosmological Distances
Astrophysics
2008-11-26 v3
Abstract
We show that recent radio and optical observations of polarized radiation from well-resolved high redshift quasars and radio galaxies rule out the cosmological rotation of the plane of polarization claimed recently by Nodland and Ralston. A least squares fit to the radio data has a slope only 2% of their claimed effect.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9705142,
title = {Observational Evidence Against Birefringence Over Cosmological Distances},
author = {J. F. C. Wardle and R. A. Perley and M. H. Cohen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9705142},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
This is a revision of a paper submitted to Phys Rev Letters. A number of modest changes have been made, including using more radio data, really replacing the optical data on Cygnus A with that on 3C265, and adding to the discussion. Three pages and three figures