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      A Broadband Spectro-polarimetric View of the NVSS Rotation Measure Catalogue I: Breaking the n{\pi}-ambiguity

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          Abstract

          The NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) Rotation Measure (RM) catalogue is invaluable for the study of cosmic magnetism. However, the RM values reported in it can be affected by n\(\pi\)-ambiguity, resulting in deviations of the reported RM from the true values by multiples of +-652.9 rad m-2. We therefore set off to observationally constrain the fraction of sources in the RM catalogue affected by this ambiguity. New broadband spectro-polarimetric observations were performed with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at 1--2 GHz, with 23 n\(\pi\)-ambiguity candidates selected by their peculiarly high |RM| values. We identified nine sources with erroneous RM values due to n\(\pi\)-ambiguity and 11 with reliable RM values. In addition, we found two sources to be unpolarised and one source to be inconsistent with neither n\(\pi\)-ambiguity nor reliable RM cases. By comparing the statistical distributions of the above two main classes, we devised a measure of how much a source's RM deviates from that of its neighbours: \(\Delta/\sigma\), which we found to be a good diagnostic of n\(\pi\)-ambiguity. With this, we estimate that there are at least 50 sources affected by n\(\pi\)-ambiguity among the 37,543 sources in the catalogue. Finally, we explored the Faraday complexities of our sources revealed by our broadband observations.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          10 May 2019
          Article
          1905.04313
          ba77ea40-ec99-4e24-9d41-1a491b88704f

          http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

          History
          Custom metadata
          27 pages, MNRAS accepted
          astro-ph.GA

          Galaxy astrophysics
          Galaxy astrophysics

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