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Published May 2017 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Modelling and simulation of large-scale polarized dust emission over the southern Galactic cap using the GASS HI data

Abstract

The Planck survey has quantified polarized Galactic foregrounds and established that they are a main limiting factor in the quest for the cosmic microwave background B-mode signal induced by primordial gravitational waves during cosmic inflation. Accurate separation of the Galactic foregrounds therefore binds this quest to our understanding of the magnetized interstellar medium. The two most relevant empirical results from analysis of Planck data are line of sight depolarization arising from fluctuations of the Galactic magnetic field orientation and alignment of filamentary dust structures with the magnetic field at high Galactic latitude. Furthermore, Planck and H I emission data in combination indicate that most of the filamentary dust structures are in the cold neutral medium. The goal of this paper is to test whether these salient observational results, taken together, can account fully for the statistical properties of the dust polarization over a selected low column density region comprising 34% of the southern Galactic cap (b ≤ −30°). To do this, we construct a dust model that incorporates H I column density maps as tracers of the dust intensity structures and a phenomenological description of the Galactic magnetic field. By adjusting the parameters of the dust model, we were able to reproduce the Planck dust observations at 353GHz in the selected region. Realistic simulations of the polarized dust emission enabled by such a dust model are useful for testing the accuracy of component separation methods, studying non-Gaussianity, and constraining the amount of decorrelation with frequency.

Additional Information

© 2017 ESO. Article published by EDP Sciences. Received 2 October 2016; Accepted 24 January 2017; Published online 04 May 2017. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council grant MISTIC (ERC-267934). Part of the research described in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. U.H. acknowledges the support by the Estonian Research Council grant IUT26-2, and by the European Regional Development Fund (TK133). The Parkes Radio Telescope is part of the Australia Telescope, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix package. Finally, we acknowledge the use of Planck data available from Planck Legacy Archive (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/planck/pla).

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Accepted Version - 1611.02418.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 18, 2023