A highly ordered Faraday rotation structure in the interstellar medium

We describe a Faraday rotation structure in the interstellar medium detected through polarimetric imaging at 1420 MHz from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS). The structure, at l = 91.degrees8; b = -2.degrees5, has an extent of similar to2degrees, within which polarization angle varies smoothly over a range of similar to100degrees. Polarized intensity also varies smoothly, showing a central peak within an outer shell. This region is in sharp contrast to its surroundings, where low-level chaotic polarization structure occurs on arcminute scales. The Faraday rotation structure has no counterpart in radio total intensity and is unrelated to known objects along the line of sight, which include a Lynds Bright Nebula, LBN 416, and the star cluster M39 (NGC 7092). It is interpreted as a smooth enhancement of electron density. The absence of a counterpart, in either optical emission or total intensity, establishes a lower limit to its distance. An upper limit is determined by the strong beam depolarization in this direction. At a probable distance of 350 +/- 50 pc, the size of the object is 10 pc, the enhancement of electron density is 1.7 cm(-3), and the mass of ionized gas is 23 M.. It has a very smooth internal magnetic field of strength 3 muG, slightly enhanced above the ambient field. G91.8-2.5 is the second such object to be discovered in the CGPS, and it seems likely that such structures are common in the magneto-ionic medium.