Peering into the Milky Way by FAST: III. Magnetic fields in the Galactic halo and farther spiral arms revealed by the Faraday effect of faint pulsars

TL;DR

This study uses FAST to measure Faraday rotation in faint pulsars, revealing detailed magnetic field structures in the Galactic halo and spiral arms, including field strength, scale height, and reversals.

Contribution

It provides new Faraday rotation measurements for 134 faint pulsars, enhancing understanding of Galactic magnetic fields and their large-scale structure.

Findings

Halo magnetic field strength ~2 μG

Halo magnetic field scale height ~2.7 kpc

Evidence of magnetic field reversals in spiral arms

Abstract

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is the most sensitive radio telescope for pulsar observations. We make polarimetric measurements of a large number of faint and distant pulsars using the FAST. We present the new measurements of Faraday rotation for 134 faint pulsars in the Galactic halo. Significant improvements are also made for some basic pulsar parameters for 15 of them. We analyse the newly determined rotation measures (RMs) for the Galactic magnetic fields by using these 134 halo pulsars, together with previously available RMs for pulsars and extragalactic radio sources and also the newly determined RMs for another 311 faint pulsars which are either newly discovered in the project of the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey or previously known pulsars without RMs. The RM tomographic analysis in the first Galactic quadrant gives roughly the same field strength of around 2~$\mu$G for the large-scale toroidal halo magnetic fields. The scale height of the halo magnetic fields is found to be at least 2.7$\pm$0.3~kpc. The RM differentiation of a large number of pulsars in the Galactic disk in the Galactic longitude range of $26^{\circ}<l<90^{\circ}$ gives evidence for the clockwise magnetic fields (viewed from the north Galactic pole) in two interarm regions inside the Scutum arm and between the Scutum and Sagittarius arm, and the clockwise fields in the Local-Perseus interarm region and field reversals in the Perseus arm and beyond.