The Galactic Halo Contribution to the Dispersion Measure of Extragalactic Fast Radio Bursts

Abstract

A new model of the Milky Way (MW) halo component of the dispersion measure (DM) for extragalactic sources, such as fast radio bursts (FRBs), is presented in light of recent diffuse X-ray observations. In addition to the spherical component of isothermal gas (\(kT\sim0.3\) keV) in hydrostatic equilibrium with the Galactic gravitational potential, our model includes a disk-like non-spherical hot gas component to reproduce the directional dependence of the observed X-ray emission measure (EM). The total gas mass (\(1.2\times10^{11}\,M_{\odot}\)) is dominated by the spherical component, and is consistent with the total baryon mass of the MW expected from the dark matter mass and the cosmic baryon-to-dark-matter ratio. Our model predicts a mean halo DM of \(43\:\,{\rm pc\:cm^{-3}}\), with a full range of \(30\)-\(245\:\,{\rm pc\:cm^{-3}}\) over the whole sky. The large scatter seen in the X-ray EM data implies a \(\sim0.2\) dex (rms) fluctuation of the MW halo DM. We provide an analytic formula to estimate the MW halo DM of our model along any line of sight, which can be easily used to compute the total MW component of DM toward extragalactic sources, in combination with existing DM models of the warm ionized medium associated with the Galactic disk.