The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry-BLASTPol: Performance and results from the 2012 Antarctic flight

TL;DR

BLASTPol, a balloon-borne telescope, successfully mapped polarized dust emission in star-forming regions during its 2012 Antarctic flight, improving instrument performance and enabling detailed magnetic field studies.

Contribution

This paper reports the first polarization maps from BLASTPol's 2012 flight, demonstrating enhanced performance and providing new insights into magnetic fields in star-forming regions.

Findings

Improved instrumental performance over previous flights.

High-quality polarization maps of molecular clouds.

Enhanced ability to trace magnetic fields from cores to clouds.

Abstract

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment, designed to study the role played by magnetic fields in the star formation process. BLASTPol observes polarized light using a total power instrument, photolithographic polarizing grids, and an achromatic half-wave plate to modulate the polarization signal. During its second flight from Antarctica in December 2012, BLASTPol made degree scale maps of linearly polarized dust emission from molecular clouds in three wavebands, centered at 250, 350, and 500 microns. The instrumental performance was an improvement over the 2010 BLASTPol flight, with decreased systematics resulting in a higher number of confirmed polarization vectors. The resultant dataset allows BLASTPol to trace magnetic fields in star-forming regions at scales ranging from cores to entire molecular cloud complexes.