Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 489, Issue 2, Pages 2330-2354Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz806
Keywords
magnetic fields; polarization; radiation mechanisms: non-thermal; methods: observational; Galaxy: structure; diffuse radiation
Categories
Funding
- Commonwealth of Australia
- ASI [ASI I/016/07/0]
- David Dunlap family
- University of Toronto
- Australian Research Council [FT110100108]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [RGPIN-2015-05948]
- Canada Research Chairs program
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [11763008]
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [772663]
- US National Science Foundation
- National Science Foundation [ACI-1440620]
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project [NCC5-626]
- Australian Research Council [FT110100108] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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We present the S-Band Polarization All Sky Survey (S-PASS), a survey of polarized radio emission over the southern sky at Dec. <-1 degrees taken with the Parkes radio telescope at 2.3 GHz. The main aim was to observe at a frequency high enough to avoid strong depolarization at intermediate Galactic latitudes (still present at 1.4 GHz) to study Galactic magnetism, but low enough to retain ample signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) at high latitudes for extragalactic and cosmological science. We developed a new scanning strategy based on long azimuth scans and a corresponding map-making procedure to make recovery of the overall mean signal of Stokes Q and U possible, a long-standing problem with polarization observations. We describe the scanning strategy, map-making procedure and validation tests. The overall mean signal is recovered with a precision better than 0.5 per cent. The maps have a mean sensitivity of 0.81 mK on beam-size scales and show clear polarized signals, typically to within a few degrees of the Galactic plane, with ample S/N everywhere (the typical signal in low-emission regions is 13 mK and 98.6 per cent of pixels have S/N > 3). The largest depolarization areas are in the inner Galaxy, associated with the Sagittarius Arm. We have also computed a rotation measure map combining S-PASS with archival data from theWilkinsonMicrowave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Planck experiments. A Stokes I map has been generated, with sensitivity limited to the confusion level of 9 mK.
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