Prototype Faraday Rotation Measure Catalogs from the Polarisation Sky Survey of the Universe’s Magnetism (POSSUM) Pilot Observations

Abstract

The Polarisation Sky Survey of the Universe’s Magnetism (POSSUM) will conduct a sensitive ∼1 GHz radio polarization survey covering 20,000 deg ^2 of the southern sky with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. In anticipation of the full survey, we analyze pilot observations of low-band (800–1087 MHz), mid-band (1316–1439 MHz), and combined-band observations for an extragalactic field and a Galactic plane field (low-band only). Using the POSSUM processing pipeline, we produce prototype rotation measure (RM) catalogs that are filtered to construct prototype RM grids. We assess typical RM grid densities and RM uncertainties and their dependence on frequency, bandwidth, and Galactic latitude. We present a median filter method for separating foreground diffuse emission from background components and find that after application of the filter, 99.5% of the measured RMs of simulated sources are within 3 σ of their true RM, with a typical loss of polarized intensity of 5% ± 5%. We find RM grid densities of 35.1, 30.6, 37.2, and 13.5 RMs per square degree and median uncertainties on RM measurements of 1.55, 12.82, 1.06, and 1.89 rad m ^−2 for the median-filtered low-band, mid-band, combined-band, and Galactic observations, respectively. We estimate that the full POSSUM survey will produce an RM catalog of ∼775,000 RMs with median-filtered low-band observations and ∼877,000 RMs with median-filtered combined-band observations. We construct a structure function from the Galactic RM catalog, which shows a break at 0.°7, corresponding to a physical scale of 12–24 pc for the nearest spiral arm.

Keywords

• Sky surveys
• Catalogs
• Spectropolarimetry
• Polarimetry
• Astrophysical magnetism
• Galaxy magnetic fields