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Investigations of Faraday Rotation Maps of Extended Radio Sources ...

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108 CHAPTER 5. A BAYESIAN VIEW ON FARADAY ROTATION MAPS<br />

The maximum likelihood method is numerically limited by computational power<br />

since it involves matrix multiplication and inversion, where the latter is a N 3 process.<br />

Thus, not all points <strong>of</strong> the many which are defined in the maps can be used. However, it<br />

is desirable to use as much information as possible from the original map. Therefore, it<br />

was chose to randomly average neighbouring points with a scheme which let to a map<br />

with spatially inhomogeneously resolved cells. The resulting map is highly resolved<br />

on top and lowest on the bottom with some random deviations which makes it similarly<br />

to the error weighting <strong>of</strong> the observed data. N = 1500 independent points were used<br />

for the analysis. On the left panel <strong>of</strong> Fig. 5.1, the averaged RM map is shown which<br />

was used for the test.<br />

As a first guess for the maximum likelihood estimator, the power spectra derived<br />

by the Fourier analysis was used. The resulting power spectrum is shown as filled<br />

circles with 1-σ error bars in Fig. 5.2. As can be seen from this figure, the input power<br />

spectrum and the power spectrum derived by the maximum likelihood estimator agree<br />

well within the one σ level. Integration over this power spectrum results in a field<br />

strength <strong>of</strong> (4.7 ± 0.3)µG in agreement with the input magnetic field strength <strong>of</strong> 5µG.<br />

5.4 Application to Hydra A<br />

5.4.1 The Data ∆<br />

The maximum likelihood estimator which was introduced and tested in the last sections<br />

is applied in the following to the <strong>Faraday</strong> rotation map <strong>of</strong> the north lobe <strong>of</strong> the radio<br />

source Hydra A (Taylor & Perley 1993). The data were kindly provided by Greg<br />

Taylor.<br />

For this purpose, a high fidelity RM map was used which was presented in Chapter<br />

4 and was generated by the developed algorithm Pacman using the original polarisation<br />

data. Pacman also provides error maps σ i by error propagation <strong>of</strong> the instrumental<br />

uncertainties <strong>of</strong> polarisation angles. The Pacman map which was used is shown in the<br />

right panel <strong>of</strong> Fig. 5.3.<br />

For the same reasons as mentioned in Sect. 5.3, the data were averaged. An appropriate<br />

averaging procedure using error weighting was applied such that<br />

RM i =<br />

∑<br />

j RM j/σj<br />

2 ∑ , (5.32)<br />

j 1/σ2 j<br />

and the error calculates as<br />

σ 2 RM i<br />

=<br />

∑ ( )<br />

j 1/σj<br />

2<br />

( ∑ ) 2<br />

=<br />

j 1/σ2 j<br />

1<br />

∑<br />

j 1/σj<br />

2<br />

. (5.33)<br />

Here, the sum goes over the set <strong>of</strong> old pixels {j} which form the new pixels {i}.<br />

The corresponding pixel coordinates {i} were also determined by applying an error<br />

weighting scheme<br />

x i =<br />

∑<br />

j x j/σ 2 j<br />

∑<br />

j 1/σ2 j<br />

and y i =<br />

∑<br />

j y j/σj<br />

2 ∑ . (5.34)<br />

j 1/σ2 j

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