Bibcode
Ashton, P. C.; Ade, Peter A. R.; Angilè, Francesco E.; Benton, Steven J.; Devlin, Mark J.; Dober, Bradley; Fissel, Laura M.; Fukui, Yasuo; Galitzki, Nicholas; Gandilo, Natalie N.; Klein, Jeffrey; Korotkov, Andrei L.; Li, Zhi-Yun; Martin, Peter G.; Matthews, Tristan G.; Moncelsi, Lorenzo; Nakamura, Fumitaka; Netterfield, Calvin B.; Novak, Giles; Pascale, Enzo; Poidevin, F.; Santos, Fabio P.; Savini, Giorgio; Scott, Douglas; Shariff, Jamil A.; Soler, Juan D.; Thomas, Nicholas E.; Tucker, Carole E.; Tucker, Gregory S.; Ward-Thompson, Derek
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 857, Issue 1, article id. 10, 17 pp. (2018).
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4
2018
Journal
Citations
36
Refereed citations
33
Description
Polarized emission from aligned dust is a crucial tool for studies of
magnetism in the ISM, but a troublesome contaminant for studies of
cosmic microwave background polarization. In each case, an understanding
of the significance of the polarization signal requires well-calibrated
physical models of dust grains. Despite decades of progress in theory
and observation, polarized dust models remain largely underconstrained.
During its 2012 flight, the balloon-borne telescope BLASTPol obtained
simultaneous broadband polarimetric maps of a translucent molecular
cloud at 250, 350, and 500 μm. Combining these data with polarimetry
from the Planck 850 μm band, we have produced a submillimeter
polarization spectrum, the first for a cloud of this type. We find the
polarization degree to be largely constant across the four bands. This
result introduces a new observable with the potential to place strong
empirical constraints on ISM dust polarization models in a previously
inaccessible density regime. Compared to models by Draine & Fraisse,
our result disfavors two of their models for which all polarization
arises due only to aligned silicate grains. By creating simple models
for polarized emission in a translucent cloud, we verify that extinction
within the cloud should have only a small effect on the polarization
spectrum shape, compared to the diffuse ISM. Thus, we expect the
measured polarization spectrum to be a valid check on diffuse ISM dust
models. The general flatness of the observed polarization spectrum
suggests a challenge to models where temperature and alignment degree
are strongly correlated across major dust components.