Related papers: Application of a helicity proxy to edge-on galaxie…
Helicity measures complexity in the field. Magnetic helicity is given by a volume integral over the scalar product of magnetic field {\bf B} and its vector potential {\bf A}. A direct computation of magnetic helicity in the solar atmosphere…
It has long been known that a large fraction of disc galaxies are lopsided. We simulate three different mechanisms that can induce lopsidedness: flyby interactions, gas accretion from cosmological filaments and ram pressure from the…
A decade ago, there was very limited knowledge of magnetic fields of our Galaxy. The local fields in the Solar vicinity were known to be directed towards a Galactic longitude $l\sim~90^{\circ}$ with reversed directions at smaller…
Magnetic fields are widely observed in various astronomical contexts, yet much remains unknown about their significance across different systems and cosmic epochs. Our current knowledge of the evolution of magnetic fields is limited by…
Magnetic fields (B-fields) are ubiquitous in the interstellar medium (ISM), and they play an essential role in the formation of molecular clouds and subsequent star formation. However, B-fields in interstellar environments remain…
We present a first application of the recently proposed LITMUS test for magnetic helicity, as well as a thorough study of its applicability under different circumstances. In order to apply this test to the galactic magnetic field, the newly…
Using the imaging polarimeter for the Submillimeter Common User Bolometric Array at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, we have detected polarized thermal emission at 850 micron from dust toward three star-forming core systems in the Orion B…
We report the detection of vertically extended far-ultraviolet (FUV) and near-UV emissions in an edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891, which we interpret as being due to dust-scattered starlight. Three-dimensional radiative transfer models are…
Magnetic fields in various astrophysical settings may be helical and, in the cosmological context, may provide a measure of primordial CP violation during baryogenesis. Yet it is difficult, even in principle, to devise a scheme by which…
Multi-line imaging of the nearby disk galaxy NGC 1482 with the Taurus Tunable Filter (TTF) on the Anglo-Australian Telescope reveals a remarkable hourglass-shaped [N II] 6583/H-alpha excitation structure suggestive of a galactic wind…
Cosmological magnetic fields induce temperature and polarization fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. A cosmological magnetic field with current amplitude of order $10^{-9}$ G is detectable via observations of…
The Galactic neutral hydrogen (HI) sky at high Galactic latitudes is suffused with linear structure. Particularly prominent in narrow spectral intervals, these linear HI features are well aligned with the plane-of-sky magnetic field…
Magnetic fields are essential to fully understand the interstellar medium (ISM) and its role in the disk-halo interface of galaxies is still poorly understood. Star formation is known to expel hot gas vertically into the halo and these…
X-ray observations of many clusters of galaxies reveal the presence of edges in surface brightness and temperature, known as "cold fronts". In relaxed clusters with cool cores, these edges have been interpreted as evidence for the…
We compare 850um SCUBA images of NGC 891 with the corresponding V-band optical depth predicted from radiation transfer simulations. These two tracers of dust show a very similar distribution along the minor axis and a reasonable agreement…
A new, much improved model of the Galactic Magnetic Field (GMF) is presented. We use the WMAP7 Galactic Synchrotron Emission map and more than forty thousand extragalactic rotation measures to constrain the parameters of the GMF model,…
Using starlight polarization, we present the properties of foreground dust towards cluster NGC 7380 embedded in H{\sc ii} region Sh 2-142. Observations of starlight polarization are carried out in four filters using an imaging polarimeter…
Using the IRAM 30-m telescope, we have mapped the 1.2mm continuum emission in NGC 891, NGC 5907 and NGC 4565. In particular this latter galaxy shows a weak, extended plateau that is correlated with HI in addition to the central peak and…
Recent measurements of Galactic polarized dust emission have found a nonzero $TB$ signal, a correlation between the total intensity and the $B$-mode polarization component. We present evidence that this parity-odd signal is driven by the…
Magnetic helicity is an invariant of ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) that encodes information on the topology of magnetic field lines. It has long been appreciated that magnetic topology is an important constraint for the evolution of…