A New Model for the Galactic Magnetic Field and Its Implications

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We use the WMAP7 Galactic Synchrotron Emission map and more than 40,000 extragalactic rotation measures to constrain the Galactic magnetic field (GMF), using a substantially more general functional form than has been used previously, now including an out-of-plane component (as suggested by observations of external galaxies) and random and striated-random fields (motivated by theoretical considerations), along with three different components of disk and halo fields. Consistent with our earlier analyses, the best-fit model has a thin disk field and an extended halo field. However with the new, more general field model, a substantial portion of the halo field is found to consist of striated magnetic fields, with a large out-of-plane component. We test different models of relativistic electron distributions, and self-consistently model their parameters. The new GMF model presented here provides a greatly improved fit to the RM and synchrotron observations. The new model predicts that an external viewer of the Milky Way would observe very similar magnetic 'X'-like structures to those seen in radio observations of edge-on Milky Way analogues, such as NGC 891. We discuss the implications of this GMF for ultrahigh energy cosmic ray deflections, composition and sources.

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