The radial component of the local Galactic magnetic field in 3D

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: McCallum, Lewis, Frank, Philipp, Hutschenreuter, Sebastian, Benjamin, Robert, Booth, Rebecca A., Clark, Susan E., Haverkorn, Marijke, Hill, Alex S., Mertsch, Philipp, Ordog, Anna, Saydjari, Andrew K., West, Jennifer
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author McCallum, Lewis
Frank, Philipp
Hutschenreuter, Sebastian
Benjamin, Robert
Booth, Rebecca A.
Clark, Susan E.
Haverkorn, Marijke
Hill, Alex S.
Mertsch, Philipp
Ordog, Anna
Saydjari, Andrew K.
West, Jennifer
author_facet McCallum, Lewis
Frank, Philipp
Hutschenreuter, Sebastian
Benjamin, Robert
Booth, Rebecca A.
Clark, Susan E.
Haverkorn, Marijke
Hill, Alex S.
Mertsch, Philipp
Ordog, Anna
Saydjari, Andrew K.
West, Jennifer
contents We present a distance-resolved reconstruction of the local line-of-sight Galactic magnetic field, $B_{||}$, by combining a 3D electron density ($n_{e}$) map derived from dust map-informed simulations and a full-sky map of Faraday rotation measure (RM). The forward model evaluates RM on the same 3D grid as the $n_{e}$ map and compares to the Galactic Faraday rotation sky. We infer $B_{||}$ with a Gaussian-process prior whose power spectrum is inferred from the data using geometric variational inference. The result is a local (within 1.25 kpc where $|b|>5^{\circ}$) map of $B_{||}$ with uncertainties. The reconstructed RM sky reproduces prominent features of Faraday rotation sky, with a root mean square average strength of $B_{||}$ of $1.63\pm 0.16$ $μ$G. In face-on views, the magnetic field exhibits coherent patches with alternating sign and hints of kpc-scale modulations, but with significant structure seen on scales of order 100 pc. The $B_{||}$ field is seen to exhibit a 3D power spectrum with an average slope of $-2.73 \pm 0.19$. We validate our $B_{||}$ reconstruction with Galactic pulsars. Predicted RMs (computed by integrating $n_{e}B_{||}$ to each pulsar's distance) correlates with observed RMs, and predicted dispersion measures (DMs) from the $n_{e}$ map also correlate with measured DMs, albeit with significant scatter.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01093
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The radial component of the local Galactic magnetic field in 3D
McCallum, Lewis
Frank, Philipp
Hutschenreuter, Sebastian
Benjamin, Robert
Booth, Rebecca A.
Clark, Susan E.
Haverkorn, Marijke
Hill, Alex S.
Mertsch, Philipp
Ordog, Anna
Saydjari, Andrew K.
West, Jennifer
Astrophysics of Galaxies
We present a distance-resolved reconstruction of the local line-of-sight Galactic magnetic field, $B_{||}$, by combining a 3D electron density ($n_{e}$) map derived from dust map-informed simulations and a full-sky map of Faraday rotation measure (RM). The forward model evaluates RM on the same 3D grid as the $n_{e}$ map and compares to the Galactic Faraday rotation sky. We infer $B_{||}$ with a Gaussian-process prior whose power spectrum is inferred from the data using geometric variational inference. The result is a local (within 1.25 kpc where $|b|>5^{\circ}$) map of $B_{||}$ with uncertainties. The reconstructed RM sky reproduces prominent features of Faraday rotation sky, with a root mean square average strength of $B_{||}$ of $1.63\pm 0.16$ $μ$G. In face-on views, the magnetic field exhibits coherent patches with alternating sign and hints of kpc-scale modulations, but with significant structure seen on scales of order 100 pc. The $B_{||}$ field is seen to exhibit a 3D power spectrum with an average slope of $-2.73 \pm 0.19$. We validate our $B_{||}$ reconstruction with Galactic pulsars. Predicted RMs (computed by integrating $n_{e}B_{||}$ to each pulsar's distance) correlates with observed RMs, and predicted dispersion measures (DMs) from the $n_{e}$ map also correlate with measured DMs, albeit with significant scatter.
title The radial component of the local Galactic magnetic field in 3D
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01093