Astrophysics

   

Two Extreme Cases of Polarization Direction Alignment, One of Starlight and the Other of Radio Qsos

Authors: Richard Shurtleff

Starlight and radio waves from QSOs share the ability to be polarized. For many regions of the Milky Way the alignment of the polarization directions of starlight is evident. However, it is useful to have a numerical alignment function that can be used to judge the significance of the correlations. The Hub Test provides such a function. Surveying the Galaxy with data from two catalogs of polarized starlight, Heiles 2000 and Berdyugin 2014, reveals an unusually well-aligned region which is then studied in more detail. Applied to a catalog of polarized radio QSOs, Pelgrims 2014 which is in part derived from Jackson 2007, a survey reveals the most significantly aligned region, which is studied further. Stars and QSOs have contrasting characteristics in terms of distance, degree of polarization, and strength of the alignment. The two most significantly aligned samples of starlight and radio QSOs are analyzed here. The alignment of the starlight sample outperforms all other portions of the Galaxy at the scale of the survey, about ten degrees, while the QSO sample has its polarization directions focusing down on a point extremely close to the QSOs themselves on the sky.

Comments: 14 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables

Download: PDF

Submission history

[v1] 2021-06-02 16:20:55

Unique-IP document downloads: 216 times

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