Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21536203f&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #362.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.550
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present results from two studies aiming to improve models of the polarized dust emission from the Galaxy for use in studies of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We show that the dust properties required to reproduce the observed Galactic extinction and polarization of starlight at ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths lead to a substantial wavelength dependent linear polarization of the thermal emission from interstellar dust at far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths. Although both the degree of linear polarization and its variation with wavelength are model dependent, our results can be gathered into two classes of models, each leading to a well defined prediction. A high Galactic latitude dust template derived from starlight polarization observations complements these results. We have observed over 600 stars in the region (|b| > 20 deg, |z| > 200 pc), which corresponds to fourteen times more data than available in the Heiles sample in the same region, over significantly more sky than covered by the Berdyugin sample. Our survey will ultimately provide starlight polarization data for a set of stars uniformly distributed over the entire high latitude Southern sky with high enough density to map the direction of the high latitude Galactic magnetic field to about 20%. This will allow for the removal of 80% of the polarized Galactic dust emission from CMB maps. The combined results from these two studies provide essential tools that will help separate Galactic foregrounds and primordial polarization signals at microwave frequencies.
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