The magneto-ionic structures of the interstellar medium of the Milky Way and the intergalactic medium are still poorly understood, especially at distances larger than a few kiloparsecs from the Sun. The three-dimensional (3D) structure of the Galacti
c magnetic field and electron density distribution may be probed through observations of radio pulsars, primarily owing to their compact nature, high velocities, and highly-polarized short-duration radio pulses. Phase 1 of the SKA, i.e. SKA1, will increase the known pulsar population by an order of magnitude, and the full SKA, i.e. SKA2, will discover pulsars in the most distant regions of our Galaxy. SKA1-VLBI will produce model-independent distances to a large number of pulsars, and wide-band polarization observations by SKA1-LOW and SKA1-MID will yield high precision dispersion measure, scattering measure, and rotation measure estimates along thousands of lines of sight. When combined, these observations will enable detailed tomography of the large-scale magneto-ionic structure of both the Galactic disk and the Galactic halo. Turbulence in the interstellar medium can be studied through the variations of these observables and the dynamic spectra of pulsar flux densities. SKA1-LOW and SKA1-MID will monitor interstellar weather and produce sensitive dynamic and secondary spectra of pulsar scintillation, which can be used to make speckle images of the ISM, study turbulence on scales between ~10^8 and ~10^13 m, and probe pulsar emission regions on scales down to $sim$10 km. In addition, extragalactic pulsars or fast radio bursts to be discovered by SKA1 and SKA2 can be used to probe the electron density distribution and magnetic fields in the intergalactic medium beyond the Milky Way.
We obtained rotation measures of 2642 quasars by cross-identification of the most updated quasar catalog and rotation measure catalog. After discounting the foreground Galactic Faraday rotation of the Milky Way, we get the residual rotation measure (
RRM) of these quasars. We carefully discarded the effects from measurement and systematical uncertainties of RRMs as well as large RRMs from outliers, and get marginal evidence for the redshift evolution of real dispersion of RRMs which steady increases to 10 rad m$^{-2}$ from $z=0$ to $zsim1$ and is saturated around the value at higher redshifts. The ionized clouds in the form of galaxy, galaxy clusters or cosmological filaments could produce the observed RRM evolutions with different dispersion width. However current data sets can not constrain the contributions from galaxy halos and cosmic webs. Future RM measurements for a large sample of quasars with high precision are desired to disentangle these different contributions.
We compiled a catalog of Faraday rotation measures (RMs) for 4553 extragalactic radio point sources ublished in literature. These RMs were derived from multi-frequency polarization observations. The RM data are compared to those in the NRAO VLA Sky S
urvey (NVSS) RM catalog. We reveal a systematic uncertainty of about $10.0 pm 1.5$,rad~m$^{-2}$ in the NVSS RM catalog. The Galactic foreground RM is calculated through a weighted averaging method by using the compiled RM catalog together with the NVSS RM catalog, with careful consideration of uncertainties in the RM data. The data from the catalog and the interface for the Galactic foreground RM calculations are publicly available on the webpage: http://zmtt.bao.ac.cn/RM/.
Pulsar nulling is a phenomenon of sudden cessation of pulse emission for a number of periods. The nulling fraction was often used to characterize the phenomenon. We propose a new method to analyse pulsar nulling phenomenon, by involving two key param
eters, the nulling degree, $chi$, which is defined as the angle in a rectangular coordinates for the numbers of nulling periods and bursting periods, and the nulling scale, $ N $, which is defined as the effective length of the consecutive nulling periods and bursting periods. The nulling degree $chi$ can be calculated by $tan chi = N_{rm nulling} / N_{rm bursting} $ and the mean is related to the nulling fraction, while the nulling scale, $ N $, is also a newly defined fundamental parameter which indicates how often the nulling occurs. We determined the distributions of $chi$ and $ N $ for 10 pulsars by using the data in literature. We found that the nulling degree $chi$ indicates the relative length of nulling to that of bursting, and the nulling scale $ N $ is found to be related to the derivative of rotation frequency and hence the loss rate of rotational energy of pulsars. Their deviations reflect the randomness of the nulling process.
Clusters of galaxies have a huge mass which can act as gravitational lenses. Galaxies behind clusters can be distorted to form arcs in images by the lenses. Herein a search was done for giant lensed arcs by galaxy clusters using the SDSS data. By vis
ually inspecting SDSS images of newly identified clusters in the SDSS DR8 and Stripe 82 data, we discover 8 strong lensing clusters together with additional 3 probable and 6 possible cases. The lensed arcs show bluer colors than the member galaxies of clusters. The masses and optical luminosities of galaxy clusters interior to the arcs are calculated, and the mass-to-light ratios are found to be in the range of a few tens of M_Solar/L_Solar, consistent with the distribution of previously known lensing clusters.
Radio continuum observations detect non-thermal synchrotron and thermal bremsstrahlung radiation. Separation of the two different emission components is crucial to study the properties of diffuse interstellar medium. The Cygnus X region is one of the
most complex areas in the radio sky which contains a number of massive stars and HII regions on the diffuse thermal and non-thermal background. More supernova remnants are expected to be discovered. We aim to develop a method which can properly separate the non-thermal and thermal radio continuum emission and apply it to the Cygnus X region. The result can be used to study the properties of different emission components and search for new supernova remnants in the complex. Multi-frequency radio continuum data from large-scale surveys are used to develop a new component separation method. Spectral analysis is done pixel by pixel for the non-thermal synchrotron emission with a realistic spectral index distribution and a fixed spectral index of beta = -2.1 for the thermal bremsstrahlung emission. With the new method, we separate the non-thermal and thermal components of the Cygnus X region at an angular resolution of 9.5arcmin. The thermal emission component is found to comprise 75% of the total continuum emission at 6cm. Thermal diffuse emission, rather than the discrete HII regions, is found to be the major contributor to the entire thermal budget. A smooth non-thermal emission background of 100 mK Tb is found. We successfully make the large-extent known supernova remnants and the HII regions embedded in the complex standing out, but no new large SNRs brighter than Sigma_1GHz = 3.7 x 10^-21 W m^-2 Hz^-1 sr^-1 are found.
The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) uses adaptive spherical panels to achieve a huge collecting area for radio waves. In this paper, we try to explore the optimal parameters for the curvature radius of spherical panels and the
focal distance by comparison of the calculated beam patterns. We show that to get the best beam shape and maximum gain, the optimal curvature radius of panels is around 300 m, and a small shift in the focal distance of a few cm is needed. The aperture efficiency can be improved by ~10% at 3 GHz by this small shift. We also try to optimise the panel positioning for the best beam, and find that panel shifts of a few mm can improve the beam pattern by a similar extent. Our results indicate that accurate control of the feed and panel positions to the mm level is very crucial for the stability of FASTs observational performance.
Using the photometric redshifts of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), we identify 132,684 clusters in the redshift range of 0.05<z<0.8. Monte Carlo simulations show that the false detection rate is less than 6% for the whole s
ample. The completeness is more than 95% for clusters with a mass of M_{200}>1.0*10^{14} M_{odot} in the redshift range of 0.05<z<0.42, while clusters of z>0.42 are less complete and have a biased smaller richness than the real one due to incompleteness of member galaxies. We compare our sample with other cluster samples, and find that more than 90% of previously known rich clusters of 0.05<z<0.42 are matched with clusters in our sample. Richer clusters tend to have more luminous brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). Correlating with X-ray and the Planck data, we show that the cluster richness is closely related to the X-ray luminosity, temperature and Sunyaev-Zeldovich measurements. Comparison of the BCGs with the SDSS luminous red galaxy (LRG) sample shows that 25% of LRGs are BCGs of our clusters and 36% of LRGs are cluster member galaxies. In our cluster sample, 63% of BCGs of r_{petro}<19.5 satisfy the SDSS LRG selection criteria.
We have finished the 6cm polarization survey of the Galactic plane using the Urumqi 25m radio telescope. It covers 10deg<l<230deg in Galactic longitude and |b| <5deg in Galactic latitude. The new polarization maps not only reveal new properties of th
e diffuse magnetized interstellar medium, but also are very useful for studying individual objects such as Hii regions, which may act as Faraday screens with strong regular magnetic fields inside, and supernova remnants for their polarization properties and spectra. The high sensitivity of the survey enables us to discover two new SNRs G178.2-4.2 and G25.3-2.1 and a number of Hii regions.
The mass function of galaxy clusters is a powerful tool to constrain cosmological parameters, e.g., the mass fluctuation on the scale of 8 h^{-1} Mpc, sigma_8, and the abundance of total matter, Omega_m. We first determine the scaling relations betwe
en cluster mass and cluster richness, summed r-band luminosity and the global galaxy number within a cluster radius. These relations are then used to two complete volume-limited rich cluster samples which we obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We estimate the masses of these clusters and determine the cluster mass function. Fitting the data with a theoretical expression, we get the cosmological parameter constraints in the form of sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^{alpha}=beta and find out the parameters of alpha=0.40-0.50 and beta=0.8-0.9, so that sigma_8=0.8-0.9 if Omega_m=0.3. Our sigma_8 value is slightly higher than recent estimates from the mass function of X-ray clusters and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data, but consistent with the weak lensing statistics.
