Studying Interstellar Turbulence in the Warm Ionized Medium

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

Interstellar turbulence in the neutral interstellar medium can be probed by using atomic and molecular lines, which yield the velocity and density structure in the medium. This is different in the warm ionized medium (WIM); although pulsar scintillation observations probe structure in the WIM on scales much smaller than a parsec, observational methods to probe turbulence in the WIM on larger scales are scarce.
A promising method to probe structure in the WIM and the Galactic magnetic field is radiopolarimetry of Galactic synchrotron emission and extragalactic point sources. Polarized extragalactic emission is Faraday rotated during its passage through the Milky Way, which allows study of the electron-density weighted magnetic field. Galactic synchrotron emission is partially depolarized, from which properties of interstellar turbulence such as its strength and typical outer scale can be derived. I will present this analysis for Southern Galactic Plane Survey data at longitudes from 253 deg to 357 deg, and argue for an outer scale of turbulence of about a hundred parsecs in the Galactic interarm regions, while the outer scale in the spiral arms is much smaller, of the order of 10 pc. Furthermore, we estimated the strength of random and regular magnetic field components and find that the random component of the magnetic field dominates the regular component in the spiral arms, whereas the regular field dominates in interarm regions.
MH acknowledges support from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is operated by Associated Universities Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

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