• Interpretation of the global anisotropy in the radio polarizations of cosmologically distant sources

• # Fulltext

https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/joaa/027/04/0443-0454

• # Keywords

Polarization; magnetic fields; galaxies: active; galaxies: high-redshift; cosmology: miscellaneous; elementary particles

• # Abstract

We present a detailed statistical study of the observed anisotropy in radio polarizations from distant extragalactic objects. This anisotropy was earlier found by Birch (1982) and reconfirmed by Jain and Ralston (1999) in a larger data set. A very strong signal was seen after imposing the cut$$|RM - \overline {RM} | &gt; 6rad/m^2$$, whereRM is the rotation measure and$$\overline {RM}$$ its mean value. In this paper, we show that there are several indications that this anisotropy cannot be attributed to bias in the data. We also find that a generalized statistic shows a very strong signal in the entire data without imposing theRM dependent cut. Finally we argue that an anisotropic background pseudoscalar field can explain the observations.

• # Author Affiliations

1. Physics Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur - 208 016, India
2. National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune University Campus, Post Bag 3, Pune - 411 007, India

• # Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy

Volume 43, 2022
All articles
Continuous Article Publishing mode

• # Continuous Article Publication

Posted on January 27, 2016

Since January 2016, the Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy has moved to Continuous Article Publishing (CAP) mode. This means that each accepted article is being published immediately online with DOI and article citation ID with starting page number 1. Articles are also visible in Web of Science immediately. All these have helped shorten the publication time and have improved the visibility of the articles.

• # Editorial Note on Continuous Article Publication

Posted on July 25, 2019