No Arabic abstract
Magnetic fields play essential roles in various astronomical objects. Radio astronomy has revealed that magnetic fields are ubiquitous in our Universe. However, the real origin and evolution of magnetic fields is poorly proven. In order to advance our knowledge of cosmic magnetism in coming decades, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) should have supreme sensitivity than ever before, which provides numerous observation points in the cosmic space. Furthermore, the SKA should be designed to facilitate wideband polarimetry so as to allow us to examine sightline structures of magnetic fields by means of depolarization and Faraday Tomography. The SKA will be able to drive cosmic magnetism of the interstellar medium, the Milky Way, galaxies, AGN, galaxy clusters, and potentially the cosmic web which may preserve information of the primeval Universe. The Japan SKA Consortium (SKA-JP) Magnetism Science Working Group (SWG) proposes the project Resolving 4-D Nature of Magnetism with Depolarization and Faraday Tomography, which contains ten scientific use cases.
Magnetic fields are involved in every astrophysical process on every scale: from planetary and stellar interiors to neutron stars, stellar wind bubbles and supernova remnants; from the interstellar medium in galactic disks, nuclei, spiral arms and halos to the intracluster and intergalactic media. They are involved in essentially every particle acceleration process and are thus fundamental to non-thermal physics in the Universe. Key questions include the origin of magnetic fields, their evolution over cosmic time, the amplification and decay processes that modify their strength, and their impact on other processes such as star formation and galaxy evolution. Astrophysical plasmas provide a unique laboratory for testing magnetic dynamo theory. The study of magnetic fields requires observations that span the wavelength range from radio through infrared, optical, UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray. Canada has an extremely strong record of research in cosmic magnetism, and has a significant leadership role in several ongoing and upcoming global programs. This white paper will review the science questions to be addressed in the study of cosmic magnetic fields and will describe the observational and theoretical opportunities and challenges afforded by the telescopes and modelling capabilities of today and tomorrow.
One of the five key science projects for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Magnetism, in which radio polarimetry will be used to reveal what cosmic magnets look like and what role they have played in the evolving Universe. Many of the SKA prototypes now being built are also targeting magnetic fields and polarimetry as key science areas. Here I review the prospects for innovative new polarimetry and Faraday rotation experiments with forthcoming facilities such as ASKAP, LOFAR, the ATA, the EVLA, and ultimately the SKA. Sensitive wide-field polarisation surveys with these telescopes will provide a dramatic new view of magnetic fields in the Milky Way, in nearby galaxies and clusters, and in the high-redshift Universe.
The origin of magnetic fields in the Universe is an open problem in astrophysics and fundamental physics. Polarization observations with the forthcoming large radio telescopes will open a new era in the observation of magnetic fields and should help to understand their origin. At low frequencies, LOFAR (10-240 MHz) will allow us to map the structure of weak magnetic fields in the outer regions and halos of galaxies, in galaxy clusters and in the Milky Way via their synchrotron emission. Even weaker magnetic fields can be measured at low frequencies with help of Faraday rotation measures. A detailed view of the magnetic fields in the local Milky Way will be derived by Faraday rotation measures from pulsars. First promising images with LOFAR have been obtained for the Crab pulsar-wind nebula, the spiral galaxy M51, the radio galaxy M87 and the galaxy clusters A2255 and A2256. With help of the polarimetric technique of Rotation Measure Synthesis, diffuse polarized emission has been detected from a magnetic bubble in the local Milky Way. Polarized emission and rotation measures were measured for more than 20 pulsars so far.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will answer fundamental questions about the origin, evolution, properties, and influence of magnetic fields throughout the Universe. Magnetic fields can illuminate and influence phenomena as diverse as star formation, galactic dynamics, fast radio bursts, active galactic nuclei, large-scale structure, and Dark Matter annihilation. Preparations for the SKA are swiftly continuing worldwide, and the community is making tremendous observational progress in the field of cosmic magnetism using data from a powerful international suite of SKA pathfinder and precursor telescopes. In this contribution, we revisit community plans for magnetism research using the SKA, in the light of these recent rapid developments. We focus in particular on the impact that new radio telescope instrumentation is generating, thus advancing our understanding of key SKA magnetism science areas, as well as the new techniques that are required for processing and interpreting the data. We discuss these recent developments in the context of the ultimate scientific goals for the SKA era.
Faraday tomography offers crucial information on the magnetized astronomical objects, such as quasars, galaxies, or galaxy clusters, by observing its magnetoionic media. The observed linear polarization spectrum is inverse Fourier transformed to obtain the Faraday dispersion function (FDF), providing us a tomographic distribution of the magnetoionic media along the line of sight. However, this transform gives a poor reconstruction of the FDF because of the instruments limited wavelength coverage. The current Faraday tomography techniques inability to reliably solve the above inverse problem has noticeably plagued cosmic magnetism studies. We propose a new algorithm inspired by the well-studied area of signal restoration, called the Constraining and Restoring iterative Algorithm for Faraday Tomography (CRAFT). This iterative model-independent algorithm is computationally inexpensive and only requires weak physically-motivated assumptions to produce high fidelity FDF reconstructions. We demonstrate an application for a realistic synthetic model FDF of the Milky Way, where CRAFT shows greater potential over other popular model-independent techniques. The dependence of observational frequency coverage on the various techniques reconstruction performance is also demonstrated for a simpler FDF. CRAFT exhibits improvements even over model-dependent techniques (i.e., QU-fitting) by capturing complex multi-scale features of the FDF amplitude and polarization angle variations within a source. The proposed approach will be of utmost importance for future cosmic magnetism studies, especially with broadband polarization data from the Square Kilometre Array and its precursors. We make the CRAFT code publicly available.