English

The large-scale Galactic magnetic field structure and pulsar rotation measures

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

Pulsars provide unique probes for the {\it large-scale} interstellar magnetic field in the Galactic disk. The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey has discovered many distant pulsars which enables us for the first time to explore the magnetic field in most of the nearby half of the Galactic disk. The fields are found to be {\it coherent in direction} over a linear scale of 10\sim 10 kpc between the Carina-Sagittarius and Crux-Scutum arms from l45\degrl\sim45\degr to l305\degrl\sim305\degr. The coherent spiral structures and field direction reversals, including the newly determined counterclockwise field near the Norma arm, are consistent with bi-symmetric spiral model for the disk field. However, the antisymmetric rotation measure sky from the Galactic halo and the dipole field in the Galactic center suggest that the A0 dynamo is operating there.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0211197,
  title  = {The large-scale Galactic magnetic field structure and pulsar rotation measures},
  author = {J. L. Han and R. N. Manchester and G. J. Qiao and A. G. Lyne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0211197},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

4 pages, with good illustrations of B-field structure. To appear in "Radio Pulsars", APS Conf. Ser., editted by M. Bailes, D. Nice, & S. Thorsett