Faraday rotation from magnesium II absorbers Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Farnes J.S.
  2. O'Sullivan S.P.
  3. Corrigan M.E.
  4. Gaensler B.M.
  5. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Strong singly ionized magnesium (Mg II) absorption lines in quasar spectra typically serve as a proxy for intervening galaxies along the line of sight. Previous studies have found a correlation between the number of these Mg II absorbers and the Faraday rotation measure (RM) at ~5 GHz. We cross-match a sample of 35752 optically identified non-intrinsic Mg II absorption systems with 25649 polarized background radio sources for which we have measurements of both the spectral index and RM at 1.4 GHz. We use the spectral index to split the resulting sample of 599 sources into flat-spectrum and steep-spectrum subsamples. We find that our flat-spectrum sample shows significant (~3.5{sigma}) evidence for a correlation between Mg II absorption and RM at 1.4 GHz, while our steep-spectrum sample shows no such correlation. We argue that such an effect cannot be explained by either luminosity or other observational effects, by evolution in another confounding variable, by wavelength-dependent polarization structure in an active galactic nucleus, by the Galactic foreground, by cosmological expansion, or by partial coverage models. We conclude that our data are most consistent with intervenors directly contributing to the Faraday rotation along the line of sight, and that the intervening systems must therefore have coherent magnetic fields of substantial strength (B{bar}=1.8+/-0.4{mu}G). Nevertheless, the weak nature of the correlation will require future high-resolution and broadband radio observations in order to place it on a much firmer statistical footing.

Keywords
  1. quasars
  2. galaxy-rotation
  3. radio-galaxies
  4. magnetic-fields
  5. polarimetry
  6. redshifted
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2014ApJ...795...63F
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/795/63
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/795/63
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.17950063

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History

2017-05-23T14:09:26Z
Resource record created
2017-05-23T14:09:26Z
Created
2017-12-04T05:48:38Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
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cds-question@unistra.fr