Linear polarization maps of the Carina Nebula were obtained at 250, 350, and 500 μm during the 2012 flight of the BLASTPol balloon-borne telescope. These measurements are combined with Planck 850 μm data in order to produce a submillimeter spectrum of the polarization fraction of the dust emission, averaged over the cloud. This spectrum is flat to within ±15% (relative to the 350 μm polarization fraction). In particular, there is no evidence for a pronounced minimum of the spectrum near 350 μm, as suggested by previous ground-based measurements of other molecular clouds. This result of a flat polarization spectrum in Carina is consistent with recently-published BLASTPol measurements of the Vela C molecular cloud, and also agrees with a published model for an externally-illuminated, dense molecular cloud by Bethell and collaborators. The shape of the spectrum in Carina does not show any dependence on the radiative environment of the dust, as quantified by the Planck-derived dust temperature or dust optical depth at 353 GHz.
@article{arxiv.1809.06375,
title = {Submillimeter Polarization Spectrum of the Carina Nebula},
author = {Jamil A. Shariff and Peter A. R. Ade and Francesco E. Angilè and Peter Ashton and Steven J. Benton and Mark J. Devlin and Bradley Dober and Laura M. Fissel and Yasuo Fukui and Nicholas Galitzki and Natalie N. Gandilo and Jeffrey Klein and Andrei L. Korotkov and Zhi-Yun Li and Peter G. Martin and Tristan G. Matthews and Lorenzo Moncelsi and Fumitaka Nakamura and Calvin B. Netterfield and Giles Novak and Enzo Pascale and Frédérick Poidevin and Fabio P. Santos and Giorgio Savini and Douglas Scott and Juan D. Soler and Nicholas E. Thomas and Carole E. Tucker and Gregory S. Tucker and Derek Ward-Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.06375},
year = {2019}
}