Related papers: Experiences with Airborne and Ground-Based Polarim…
Tons of space particles enter the Earth atmosphere every year, being detected when they produce fireballs, meteor showers, or when they impact the Earth surface. Particle detection in the showers could also be attempted from space using…
Science opportunities and recommendations concerning optical/infrared polarimetry for the upcoming decade in the field of cosmology. Community-based White Paper to Astro2010 in response to the call for such papers.
Aligned non-spherical dust particles polarize starlight passing through the dust cloud. They also emit polarized far infrared and sub-mm radiation. Substantial progress in understanding of grain alignment theory makes the interpretation of…
Polarized dust emission is a key tracer in the study of interstellar medium and of star formation. The observed polarization, however, is a product of magnetic field structure, dust grain properties and grain alignment efficiency, as well…
Polarimetry is one of the most informative techniques of studying magnetic fields in molecular clouds. How reliable the interpretation of the polarization maps in terms of magnetic fields is the issue that the grain alignment theory…
Polarization observations of the Milky Way and many other spiral galaxies have found a close correspondence between the orientation of spiral arms and magnetic field lines on scales of hundreds of parsecs. This paper presents polarization…
With the increasing number of experiments dedicated to the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, interest on the detailed properties of the foreground Galactic emission has risen. In particular the focus is shifting towards…
We present a polarimetric map of a 20'x20' area toward the Galactic center. The polarization of point sources has been measured in the J, H, and Ks bands using the near-infrared polarimetric camera SIRPOL on the 1.4 m telescope IRSF. One…
The analysis of the submm anisotropies that will be mapped by the forthcoming MAP and PLANCK satellites requires careful foreground subtraction before measuring CMB fluctuations. Among these, the foreground due to IR/submm thermal radiation…
Calculations are performed for the linear polarization of starlight due to extinction by aligned dust grains when the starlight traverses a medium with irregular magnetic fields. This medium is intended to represent the optically thick…
One of the most informative techniques of studying magnetic fields in molecular clouds is based on the use of starlight polarization and polarized emission arising from aligned dust. How reliable the interpretation of the polarization maps…
Polarization of interstellar dust emission is a powerful probe of dust properties and magnetic field structure. Yet studies of external galaxies are hampered by foreground dust contribution. The aim of this study is to separate the…
This paper discusses the science case for a sensitive spectro-polarimetric survey of the microwave sky. Such a survey would provide a tomographic and dynamic census of the three-dimensional distribution of hot gas, velocity flows, early…
Within four nearby (d < 160 pc) molecular clouds, we statistically evaluate the structure of the interstellar magnetic field, projected on the plane of the sky and integrated along the line of sight, as inferred from the polarized thermal…
Polarimeric maps have been used on the characterization of the magnetic field in molecular clouds. However, it is difficult to determine the 3-dimensional properties of these regions from the projected maps. In that case, numerical…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Polarized dust emission outside of disks reveal the magnetic field morphology of molecular clouds. Within disks, however, polarized dust emission can arise from very different mechanisms (e.g., self-scattering), and each of them are useful…
Continuum polarization over the UV-to-microwave range is due to dichroic extinction (or emission) by asymmetric, aligned dust grains. Because of both grain alignment and scattering physics, the wavelength dependence of the polarization,…
Magnetic fields play important roles in many astrophysical processes. However, there is no universal diagnostic for the magnetic fields in the interstellar medium (ISM) and each magnetic tracer has its limitation. Any new detection method…
Thermal dust continuum polarimetry is a powerful indirect probe of magnetic field geometry in dense molecular clouds while at the same time providing information on the alignment of dust grains with the magnetic field. The leading theory of…