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Register a new userRotation Measure Synthesis of Galactic Polarized Emission with the DRAO 26-m Telescope
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Radio polarimetry at decimetre wavelengths is the principal source of information on the Galactic magnetic field. The diffuse polarized emission is strongly influenced by Faraday rotation in the magneto-ionic medium and rotation measure is the prime quantity of interest, implying that all Stokes parameters must be measured over wide frequency bands with many frequency channels. The DRAO 26-m Telescope has been equipped with a wideband feed, a polarization transducer to deliver both hands of circular polarization, and a receiver, all operating from 1277 to 1762 MHz. Half-power beamwidth is between 40 and 30 arcminutes. A digital FPGA spectrometer, based on commercially available components, produces all Stokes parameters in 2048 frequency channels over a 485-MHz bandwidth. Signals are digitized to 8 bits and a Fast Fourier Transform is applied to each data stream. Stokes parameters are then generated in each frequency channel. This instrument is in use at DRAO for a Northern sky polarization survey. Observations consist of scans up and down the Meridian at a drive rate of 0.9 degree per minute to give complete coverage of the sky between declinations -30 degree and 90 degree. This paper presents a complete description of the receiver and data acquisition system. Only a small fraction of the frequency band of operation is allocated for radio astronomy, and about 20 percent of the data are lost to interference. The first 8 percent of data from the survey are used for a proof-of-concept study, which has led to the first application of Rotation Measure Synthesis to the diffuse Galactic emission obtained with a single-antenna telescope. We find rotation measure values for the diffuse emission as high as approximately 100 rad per square metre, much higher than recorded in earlier work.
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The DRAO Synthesis Telescope (ST) is a forefront telescope for imaging large-scale neutral hydrogen and polarized radio continuum emission at arcminute resolution. Equipped for observations at 1420 and 408 MHz, the ST completed the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey, providing pioneering measurements of arcminute-scale structure in HI emission and self-absorption and of the diffuse polarized emission, using a fine grid of Rotation Measures to chart the large-scale Galactic magnetic field, and advancing the knowledge of the Galactic rotation curve. In this paper we describe a plan for renewal of the Synthesis Telescope that will create a forefront scientific instrument, a testbed for new radio astronomy technologies, and a training ground for the next generation of Canadian radio astronomers and radio telescope engineers. The renewed telescope will operate across the entire range 400 to 1800 MHz. Collaborations between DRAO and university partners have already demonstrated a novel feed antenna to cover this range, low-noise amplifiers, and a new GPU-based correlator of bandwidth 400 MHz. The renewed ST will provide excellent sensitivity to extended HI, covering the Galactic disk and halo, spectro-polarimetry with unprecedented resolution in angle and in Faraday depth, the ability to search for OH masers in all four 18-cm lines simultaneously, and sensitive recombination-line observations stacked over as many as forty transitions. As a testbed the renewed ST will evaluate low-cost digital clocking and sampling techniques of wide significance for the ngVLA, SKA, and other future telescopes, and a prototype of the digital correlator developed at DRAO for SKA-mid.
HI observations of the nearby blue compact dwarf galaxy IC 10 obtained with the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory synthesis telescope (DRAO), for a total integration of $sim$1000 hours, are presented. We confirm the NW faint 21 cm HI emission feature discovered in GBT observations. The HI feature has an HI mass of 4.7 $times 10^{5}$ M$_{odot}$, which is only $sim$ 0.6$%$ of the total HI mass of the galaxy (7.8 $times 10^{7}$ M$_{odot}$). In the inner disk, the rotation curve of IC 10 rises steeply, then flattens until the last point where it rises again, with a maximum velocity of 30 km s$^{-1}$. Based on our mass models, the kinematics of the inner disk of IC 10 can be described without the need of a dark matter halo. However, this does not exclude the possible presence of dark matter on a larger scale. It is unlikely that the disturbed features seen in the outer HI disk of IC 10 are caused by an interaction with M 31. Features seen from our simulations are larger and at lower surface density than can be reached by current observations. The higher velocity dispersions seen in regions where several distinct HI features meet with the main core of IC 10 suggests that there is ongoing accretion.
The Effelsberg telescope as well as the DRAO synthesis telescope are currently surveying the Galactic polarized emission at 21 cm in detail. These new surveys reveal an unexpected richness of small-scale structures in the polarized sky. However, observations made with synthesis or single-dish telescopes are not on absolute intensity scales and therefore lack information about the large-scale distribution of polarized emission to a different degree. Until now, absolutely calibrated polarization data from the Leiden/Dwingeloo polarization surveys are used to recover the missing spatial information. However, these surveys cannot meet the requirements of the recent survey projects regarding sampling and noise and new polarization observation were initiated to complement the Leiden/Dwingeloo Survey. In this paper we will outline the observation and report on the progress for a new polarization survey of the northern sky with the 26-m telescope of the DRAO.
We present results of interferometric polarization observations of the recently discovered magnetar J1745-2900 in the vicinity of the Galactic center. The observations were made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) on 21 February 2014 in the range 40-48 GHz. The full polarization mode and A configuration of the array were used. The average total and linearly polarized flux density of the pulsar amounts to 2.3$pm$0.31 mJy/beam and 1.5$pm$0.2 mJy/beam, respectively. Analysis shows a rotation measure (RM) of (-67$pm$3)x10$^3$ rad/m$^2$, which is in a good agreement with previous measurements at longer wavelengths. These high frequency observations are sensitive to RM values of up to ~2x10$^7$ rad/m$^2$. However, application of the Faraday RM synthesis technique did not reveal other significant RM components in the pulsar emission. This supports an external nature of a single thin Faraday-rotating screen which should be located close to the Galactic center. The Faraday corrected intrinsic electric vector position angle is 16$pm$9 deg East of North, and coincides with the position angle of the pulsars transverse velocity. All measurements of the pulsars RM value to date, including the one presented here, well agree within errors, which points towards a steady nature of the Faraday-rotating medium.
The CLEAN deconvolution algorithm has well-known limitations due to the restriction of locating point source model components on a discretized grid. In this letter we demonstrate that these limitations are even more pronounced when applying CLEAN in the case of Rotation Measure (RM) synthesis imaging. We suggest a modification that uses Maximum Likelihood estimation to adjust the CLEAN-derived sky model. We demonstrate through the use of mock one-dimensional RM synthesis observations that this technique shows significant improvement over standard CLEAN and gives results that are independent of the chosen image pixelization. We suggest using this simple modification to CLEAN in upcoming polarization sensitive sky surveys.
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