View larger. | Galaxy NGC 5775 and its magnetic field are seen together in this composite image, which is made via radio data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) near Socorro, New Mexico, superimposed on an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope. This composite won 2nd place in a National Radio Astronomy Observatory image contest to celebrate VLA’s 40-year anniversary. Image via Jayanne English/ NRAO/ HST /J.Irwin et al.
Until recently, measuring faint magnetic fields for distant galaxies was an exceedingly hard thing to do. Telescopes simply weren’t sensitive enough to register such faint signals. In 2011, though, the famous Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory in New Mexico was updated and equipped with a new correlator (a new “brain,” more or less), plus new fiber optics and electronics. The renovations made it possible for the VLA to observe over a much wider portion of the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum than before. As a result, astronomers have begun to probe the large gas halos surrounding galaxies. And they’ve detected – and begun to visualize – the vast magnetic fields stretching out far into these halos.
If you want to observe the elusive magnetic fields of galaxies, it’s not so practical to look at face-on galaxies, that is, galaxies we see from above or below their disk. The faint emission from the magnetic fields of face-on galaxies are drowned in the bright emissions the stars in from these galaxies’ disks. Instead it’s more practical to look at edge-on galaxies. When astronomers view a galaxy edge-on, they can more clearly see the faint halo above and below the galaxy’s flat disk. Then they can measure the special radio emission caused by the galaxy’s magnetic field.
An example of a face-on galaxy is shown in the left image (NGC 3344) and an example of an edge-on galaxy in the right image (NGC 891). The latter has the optimal orientation for astronomers to detect magnetic fields above and below the galaxy disk. Images via Adam Block/ Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/ University of Arizona/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 US) and Hewholooks/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Look again at the image at the very top of this page. Galaxy NGC 5775 is an edge-on galaxy. It’s relatively near to us, as galaxies go, at 94 million light-years. That’s why the VLA managed to capture data that lets us see this galaxy’s halo and its magnetic field in great detail. The radio image is superimposed onto an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxy’s flat disk. You can see pinkish bubbles of hot gas in the disk. These bubble are the birthplaces of cosmic rays that travel out as winds and help form the large halo of the galaxy, which is visible in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum and thus visible to the newly updated VLA.
Updates to the Very Large Array – renamed to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, but still known to astronomers as the VLA – allowed magnetic fields in the outskirts of galaxies to begin to be probed. Image via Theresa Wiegert.
Some of the cosmic rays in NGC 5775 are caught by the magnetic field lines in the galaxy’s halo. Magnetic field lines show the direction of magnetic force: for example, if strong magnetic field lines were affecting an earthly compass, they’d be telling the needle of your compass which direction to point. That’s why a compass needle points northward.
A bar magnet with iron filings lining up showing the magnetic field lines. Similar to this, radiation from very fast electrons – cosmic rays – trace galactic magnetic field lines as they spiral around them. Image via Physics Stackexchange.
In the galaxy image at top, we see the magnetic field lines as “flow lines.” It’s from these lines of magnetic force that the radio emission flows, later to be picked up by the VLA. The field lines go out unexpectedly far, as far as 26,000 light-years from the disk of galaxy NGC 5775. That is a quarter of the size of the galaxy itself!
Notice that, in the images in this article, the flow lines of a galaxy’s magnetic field look a bit like the shimmering “curtains” of light sometimes seen in aurorae, or northern lights. Like the needle of your compass, aurorae are being led by lines of force in Earth’s magnetic field.
Other planets have aurorae, too; Jupiter has an incredibly strong magnetic field, 14 times stronger than the Earth’s!
In comparison, the magnetic fields found in galaxies are on the order of a million times weaker than the Earth’s. So you might see that it’s amazing we can detect such a thing from millions of light-years away.
Here’s another galaxy whose magnetic field has been imaged using observations from the VLA. This image shows a closeup of NGC 4666 in optical as observed by Hubble, with a VLA radio image of the magnetic field lines superimposed in green. This galaxy, located 86 million light-years from us, produces a lot more stars per year than the Milky Way and is called a starburst galaxy. Its halo with its accompanying magnetic field is enormous, stretching out 22,000 light-years from the disk. In this galaxy, astronomers also discovered that the magnetic field is changing directions in the disk. This image received an honorable mention in the recent image contest of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Read more about this image. Image via Yelena Stein/ NRAO/ HST/ CTIO/ J.Irwin et al.
But what are a galaxy’s magnetic fields, really? How do astronomers measure them?
Normally, magnetism is visually invisible to us. The magnet on a toy car affecting another car in a kid’s train set can seem like magic (even to adults who think about it). We can’t see magnetism with our eyes. Yet the magnetic field of the Earth is pervasive in our lives, always surrounding us, strong enough to protect us from ionizing radiation from the sun, which otherwise would wreak havoc on our cells.
When an electron moves really fast, close to the speed of light, it’s called a cosmic ray. When a cosmic ray gets close to a magnetic field line in a galaxy, it will spiral around it and send out a special kind of radio emission called synchrotron emission. Using a radio telescope like the VLA, astronomers can measure this faint radiation and see how it is polarized – the synchrotron emission is a tracer of the magnetic field that caused it.
So astronomers know that where they find synchrotron emission in galaxies, there must also be magnetic fields present.
But there are a bunch of things we don’t yet know. How are a galaxy’s magnetic fields created, and how are they maintained?
NGC 4217 is an edge-on galaxy with an impressively extended magnetic field. It is similar to our Milky Way in structure and is located 67 million light-years from us. Like that for NGC 5775, this image is a composition of an image showing the galaxy in optical light with ionized hydrogen data in red and radio data with magnetic field lines superposed onto it. Image via Yelena Stein/ NRAO/ SDSS/ KPNO/ J.Irwin et al.
When their observations of the universe bring up questions, astronomers often sit down to find their answers via astrophysical theory. One popular theory that explains magnetic fields inside a galaxy’s disk is called a galactic dynamo . In short, the theory describes how an internal (to the galaxy) dynamo creates the magnetic field by a fluid-like motion – rotation and convection – in hot gas so that kinetic energy (energy due to motion) converts into magnetic energy.
A distant galaxy’s internal dynamo might be fuelled by supernova explosions. Rotational forces and motions might be at work to create a large, symmetric magnetic field. Meanwhile, other gas movements within the galaxy – for example, infalling gas – would create asymmetries within the field.
But remember what we said earlier about a galaxy’s magnetic field. It is seen to stretch far, far out into a galaxy’s surrounding halo. One thing that’s not known is how the magnetic field can be maintained, so far out into the halo. This is an area of current research and observation, now that instruments allow astronomers to detect and measure magnetic fields at these faint levels. Another, new, radio telescope that will be of even further help in this endeavor is the upcoming Square Kilometre Array.
By the way, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, also has a magnetic field. Recent research shows that the Milky Way’s magnetic field is twisting!
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Visualizations of the magnetic fields of galaxies might be in part inspired by images like this one, of earthly aurorae. However, the light from aurorae is created a bit differently: from molecules in our atmosphere that are energized by ionized particles from the sun caught in the Earth’s magnetic field. David Kakuktinniq at Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada, captured the aurora borealis on September 12, 2020. He wrote: “Northern Lights over the Hudson Bay, with Mars near the center of the image.” Thanks, David!
The images of galactic magnetic fields shown on this page are not photos, like the photo of the northern lights above. We can’t see the magnetic fields of galaxies by looking with our eyes.
Instead, astronomers need to do some special processing to retrieve the magnetic fields, by looking at the intensity and the polarizaion of the radio waves. Once you have the polarization, you know the direction of the magnetic field in different locations and can plot that in a map as arrows (vectors). Those kinds of maps aren’t very visually appealing though, so instead, the magnetic fields have here been brought forth in a new technique using a so called line convolution integral method. It allows the vectors to be smoothed with the image of the halo in a pattern showing exactly the same thing – the intensity and the direction of the magnetic field. Astronomer Jayanne English is a professor at the University of Manitoba and has either led or assisted in the development of all the images shown here. She engagingly explains how they are made here.
Bottom line: Until recently, magnetic fields in the outskirts of galaxies were too faint to observe. This article talks about why – and a bit about how – we can begin to view these vast fields now.
from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2OAhFkM
View larger. | Galaxy NGC 5775 and its magnetic field are seen together in this composite image, which is made via radio data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) near Socorro, New Mexico, superimposed on an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope. This composite won 2nd place in a National Radio Astronomy Observatory image contest to celebrate VLA’s 40-year anniversary. Image via Jayanne English/ NRAO/ HST /J.Irwin et al.
Until recently, measuring faint magnetic fields for distant galaxies was an exceedingly hard thing to do. Telescopes simply weren’t sensitive enough to register such faint signals. In 2011, though, the famous Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory in New Mexico was updated and equipped with a new correlator (a new “brain,” more or less), plus new fiber optics and electronics. The renovations made it possible for the VLA to observe over a much wider portion of the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum than before. As a result, astronomers have begun to probe the large gas halos surrounding galaxies. And they’ve detected – and begun to visualize – the vast magnetic fields stretching out far into these halos.
If you want to observe the elusive magnetic fields of galaxies, it’s not so practical to look at face-on galaxies, that is, galaxies we see from above or below their disk. The faint emission from the magnetic fields of face-on galaxies are drowned in the bright emissions the stars in from these galaxies’ disks. Instead it’s more practical to look at edge-on galaxies. When astronomers view a galaxy edge-on, they can more clearly see the faint halo above and below the galaxy’s flat disk. Then they can measure the special radio emission caused by the galaxy’s magnetic field.
An example of a face-on galaxy is shown in the left image (NGC 3344) and an example of an edge-on galaxy in the right image (NGC 891). The latter has the optimal orientation for astronomers to detect magnetic fields above and below the galaxy disk. Images via Adam Block/ Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/ University of Arizona/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 US) and Hewholooks/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Look again at the image at the very top of this page. Galaxy NGC 5775 is an edge-on galaxy. It’s relatively near to us, as galaxies go, at 94 million light-years. That’s why the VLA managed to capture data that lets us see this galaxy’s halo and its magnetic field in great detail. The radio image is superimposed onto an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxy’s flat disk. You can see pinkish bubbles of hot gas in the disk. These bubble are the birthplaces of cosmic rays that travel out as winds and help form the large halo of the galaxy, which is visible in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum and thus visible to the newly updated VLA.
Updates to the Very Large Array – renamed to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, but still known to astronomers as the VLA – allowed magnetic fields in the outskirts of galaxies to begin to be probed. Image via Theresa Wiegert.
Some of the cosmic rays in NGC 5775 are caught by the magnetic field lines in the galaxy’s halo. Magnetic field lines show the direction of magnetic force: for example, if strong magnetic field lines were affecting an earthly compass, they’d be telling the needle of your compass which direction to point. That’s why a compass needle points northward.
A bar magnet with iron filings lining up showing the magnetic field lines. Similar to this, radiation from very fast electrons – cosmic rays – trace galactic magnetic field lines as they spiral around them. Image via Physics Stackexchange.
In the galaxy image at top, we see the magnetic field lines as “flow lines.” It’s from these lines of magnetic force that the radio emission flows, later to be picked up by the VLA. The field lines go out unexpectedly far, as far as 26,000 light-years from the disk of galaxy NGC 5775. That is a quarter of the size of the galaxy itself!
Notice that, in the images in this article, the flow lines of a galaxy’s magnetic field look a bit like the shimmering “curtains” of light sometimes seen in aurorae, or northern lights. Like the needle of your compass, aurorae are being led by lines of force in Earth’s magnetic field.
Other planets have aurorae, too; Jupiter has an incredibly strong magnetic field, 14 times stronger than the Earth’s!
In comparison, the magnetic fields found in galaxies are on the order of a million times weaker than the Earth’s. So you might see that it’s amazing we can detect such a thing from millions of light-years away.
Here’s another galaxy whose magnetic field has been imaged using observations from the VLA. This image shows a closeup of NGC 4666 in optical as observed by Hubble, with a VLA radio image of the magnetic field lines superimposed in green. This galaxy, located 86 million light-years from us, produces a lot more stars per year than the Milky Way and is called a starburst galaxy. Its halo with its accompanying magnetic field is enormous, stretching out 22,000 light-years from the disk. In this galaxy, astronomers also discovered that the magnetic field is changing directions in the disk. This image received an honorable mention in the recent image contest of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Read more about this image. Image via Yelena Stein/ NRAO/ HST/ CTIO/ J.Irwin et al.
But what are a galaxy’s magnetic fields, really? How do astronomers measure them?
Normally, magnetism is visually invisible to us. The magnet on a toy car affecting another car in a kid’s train set can seem like magic (even to adults who think about it). We can’t see magnetism with our eyes. Yet the magnetic field of the Earth is pervasive in our lives, always surrounding us, strong enough to protect us from ionizing radiation from the sun, which otherwise would wreak havoc on our cells.
When an electron moves really fast, close to the speed of light, it’s called a cosmic ray. When a cosmic ray gets close to a magnetic field line in a galaxy, it will spiral around it and send out a special kind of radio emission called synchrotron emission. Using a radio telescope like the VLA, astronomers can measure this faint radiation and see how it is polarized – the synchrotron emission is a tracer of the magnetic field that caused it.
So astronomers know that where they find synchrotron emission in galaxies, there must also be magnetic fields present.
But there are a bunch of things we don’t yet know. How are a galaxy’s magnetic fields created, and how are they maintained?
NGC 4217 is an edge-on galaxy with an impressively extended magnetic field. It is similar to our Milky Way in structure and is located 67 million light-years from us. Like that for NGC 5775, this image is a composition of an image showing the galaxy in optical light with ionized hydrogen data in red and radio data with magnetic field lines superposed onto it. Image via Yelena Stein/ NRAO/ SDSS/ KPNO/ J.Irwin et al.
When their observations of the universe bring up questions, astronomers often sit down to find their answers via astrophysical theory. One popular theory that explains magnetic fields inside a galaxy’s disk is called a galactic dynamo . In short, the theory describes how an internal (to the galaxy) dynamo creates the magnetic field by a fluid-like motion – rotation and convection – in hot gas so that kinetic energy (energy due to motion) converts into magnetic energy.
A distant galaxy’s internal dynamo might be fuelled by supernova explosions. Rotational forces and motions might be at work to create a large, symmetric magnetic field. Meanwhile, other gas movements within the galaxy – for example, infalling gas – would create asymmetries within the field.
But remember what we said earlier about a galaxy’s magnetic field. It is seen to stretch far, far out into a galaxy’s surrounding halo. One thing that’s not known is how the magnetic field can be maintained, so far out into the halo. This is an area of current research and observation, now that instruments allow astronomers to detect and measure magnetic fields at these faint levels. Another, new, radio telescope that will be of even further help in this endeavor is the upcoming Square Kilometre Array.
By the way, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, also has a magnetic field. Recent research shows that the Milky Way’s magnetic field is twisting!
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Visualizations of the magnetic fields of galaxies might be in part inspired by images like this one, of earthly aurorae. However, the light from aurorae is created a bit differently: from molecules in our atmosphere that are energized by ionized particles from the sun caught in the Earth’s magnetic field. David Kakuktinniq at Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada, captured the aurora borealis on September 12, 2020. He wrote: “Northern Lights over the Hudson Bay, with Mars near the center of the image.” Thanks, David!
The images of galactic magnetic fields shown on this page are not photos, like the photo of the northern lights above. We can’t see the magnetic fields of galaxies by looking with our eyes.
Instead, astronomers need to do some special processing to retrieve the magnetic fields, by looking at the intensity and the polarizaion of the radio waves. Once you have the polarization, you know the direction of the magnetic field in different locations and can plot that in a map as arrows (vectors). Those kinds of maps aren’t very visually appealing though, so instead, the magnetic fields have here been brought forth in a new technique using a so called line convolution integral method. It allows the vectors to be smoothed with the image of the halo in a pattern showing exactly the same thing – the intensity and the direction of the magnetic field. Astronomer Jayanne English is a professor at the University of Manitoba and has either led or assisted in the development of all the images shown here. She engagingly explains how they are made here.
Bottom line: Until recently, magnetic fields in the outskirts of galaxies were too faint to observe. This article talks about why – and a bit about how – we can begin to view these vast fields now.
from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2OAhFkM
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