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Register a new userOptical polarization map of the Polaris Flare with RoboPol
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Georgia Virginia Panopoulou
Publication date
2015
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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The stages before the formation of stars in molecular clouds are poorly understood. Insights can be gained by studying the properties of quiescent clouds, such as their magnetic field structure. The plane-of-the-sky orientation of the field can be traced by polarized starlight. We present the first extended, wide-field ($sim$10 $rm deg^2$) map of the Polaris Flare cloud in dust-absorption induced optical polarization of background stars, using the RoboPol polarimeter at the Skinakas Observatory. This is the first application of the wide-field imaging capabilities of RoboPol. The data were taken in the R-band and analysed with the automated reduction pipeline of the instrument. We present in detail optimizations in the reduction pipeline specific to wide-field observations. Our analysis resulted in reliable measurements of 641 stars with median fractional linear polarization 1.3%. The projected magnetic field shows a large scale ordered pattern. At high longitudes it appears to align with faint striations seen in the Herschel-SPIRE map of dust emission (250 $mu m$), while in the central 4-5 deg$^2$ it shows an eddy-like feature. The overall polarization pattern we obtain is in good agreement with large scale measurements by Planck of the dust emission polarization in the same area of the sky.
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We present the first linear polarimetric survey of white dwarfs (WDs). Our sample consists of WDs of DA and DC spectral types in the SDSS r magnitude range from 13 to 17. We performed polarimetric observations with the RoboPol polarimeter attached to the 1.3-m telescope at the Skinakas Observatory. We have 74 WDs in our sample, of which almost all are low polarized WDs with polarization degree (PD) smaller than 1%, while only 2 have PD higher than 1%. There is an evidence that on average the isolated WDs of DC type have higher PD (with median PD of 0.78%) than the isolated DA type WDs (with median PD of 0.36%). On the other hand, the median PD of isolated DA type WDs is almost the same, i.e. 0.36% as the median PD of DA type white dwarfs in binary systems with red dwarfs (dM type), i.e. 0.33%. This shows, as expected, that there is no contribution to the PD from the companion if the WD companion is the red dwarf, which is the most common situation for WDs binary systems. We do not find differences in the polarization degree between magnetic and non-magnetic WDs. Because 97% of WDs in our sample have PD lower than 1%, they can be used as faint zero--polarized standard star in the magnitude range from 13 up to 17 of SDSS r filter. They cover the Northern sky between 13 hour to 23 hour in right ascension and from -11 degrees to 78 degrees in declination. Additionally, we found that for low extinction values (< 0.04) the best model that describes the dependence of PD on E(B-V) is given by the equation: PD_{max, ISM}[%] = 0.65 x E(B-V)^{0.12}.
We present a new set of optical polarization plane rotations in blazars, observed during the third year of operation of RoboPol. The entire set of rotation events discovered during three years of observations is analysed with the aim of determining whether these events are inherent in all blazars. It is found that the frequency of the polarization plane rotations varies widely among blazars. This variation cannot be explained either by a difference in the relativistic boosting or by selection effects caused by a difference in the average fractional polarization. We conclude that the rotations are characteristic of a subset of blazars and that they occur as a consequence of their intrinsic properties.
We have developed a software-based polarization spectrometer, PolariS, to acquire full-Stokes spectra with a very high spectral resolution of 61 Hz. The primary aim of PolariS is to measure the magnetic fields in dense star-forming cores by detecting the Zeeman splitting of molecular emission lines. The spectrometer consists of a commercially available digital sampler and a Linux computer. The computer is equipped with a graphics processing unit (GPU) to process FFT and cross-correlation using the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) library developed by NVIDIA. Thanks to a high degree of precision in quantization of the analog-to-digital converter and arithmetic in the GPU, PolariS offers excellent performances in linearity, dynamic range, sensitivity, bandpass flatness and stability. The software has been released under the MIT License and is available to the public. In this paper, we report the design of PolariS and its performance verified through engineering tests and commissioning observations.
We present measurements of rotations of the optical polarization of blazars during the second year of operation of RoboPol, a monitoring programme of an unbiased sample of gamma-ray bright blazars specially designed for effective detection of such events, and we analyse the large set of rotation events discovered in two years of observation. We investigate patterns of variability in the polarization parameters and total flux density during the rotation events and compare them to the behaviour in a non-rotating state. We have searched for possible correlations between average parameters of the polarization-plane rotations and average parameters of polarization, with the following results: (1) there is no statistical association of the rotations with contemporaneous optical flares; (2) the average fractional polarization during the rotations tends to be lower than that in a non-rotating state; (3) the average fractional polarization during rotations is correlated with the rotation rate of the polarization plane in the jet rest frame; (4) it is likely that distributions of amplitudes and durations of the rotations have physical upper bounds, so arbitrarily long rotations are not realised in nature.
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