Mostly Mute Monday: Stunning Pictures Of The Milky Way’s Magnetic Field
“From the light’s polarization, we can reconstruct the galaxy’s magnetic field. And by superimposing it over the foreground emission map, we can see for the first time how our galaxy’s structure and magnetic field are interrelated. What we found was an intricate relationship between dust grains — the precursors to stars – and the giant magnetic structures we find, some of which extend for over a thousand light years in diameter.”
If you want to view the Milky Way in all its true splendor, you need to go beyond visible light, as the cosmic dust that gives rise to new stars also absorbs visible light, robbing us of a view of our galaxy. But those other wavelengths that are more transparent to the dust — infrared and microwave — are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere. If we want to see what’s going on, we’ve got to go to space. With nine different frequency maps covering the entire sky, the ESA’s Planck satellite not only can determine what’s through that dust, but it can measure the effects of the Milky Way’s magnetic field due to the polarization of light, showing the future of star birth in our own galaxy.
After a short hiatus while we worked to figure it out, our Mostly Mute Monday series is back!
