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New All-Sky Map Shows the Magnetic Fields of the Milky Way
An anonymous reader writes "With a unique new all-sky map, scientists at MPA have made significant progress toward measuring the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Specifically, the map is of a quantity known as Faraday depth, which among other things, depends strongly on the magnetic fields along a particular line of sight. To produce the map, data were combined from more than 41,000 individual measurements using a novel image reconstruction technique. The work was a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), who are specialists in the new discipline of information field theory, and a large international team of radio astronomers. The new map not only reveals the structure of the galactic magnetic field on large scales, but also small-scale features that provide information about turbulence in the galactic gas."
Looks like the slashdot effect is in full force already...
Fucking Magnetic Field Structures of the Galaxy; how do they work?
Google Cache Link
Shouldn't /. automatically append a cache link to every submitted link?
Here is another site we can try to destroy with the power of the force.
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/institute/news_archives/news1112_fara/news1112_fara-en-print.html
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Do we really need to know about the turbulence in the galactic gas?
<Tangential tie-in due to reference to cosmic magnetic fields. Breathless, incoherent pseudoscience with suggestion of a conspiracy in mainstream physics to suppress this enlightened perspective. Also, TimeCube.>
Instead of problems at work, relationship woes, or my own identity and how it relates to life, I was laying awake all night last night wondering about this kind of stuff...
who are specialists in the new discipline
...would be a magnetic map superimposed on an inverse map of known stellar objects where "brightness" is the estimated mass calibrated such that stars that behave as we'd expect them to will show up as black (or near to it). (ie: calculate what you'd hypothesize the magnetic fields "should" be if all models are correct, then look at the difference between what you see and what you expect to see.)
In other words, what doesn't match up? Maps are wonderful things, but in science you really don't care too much about the knowns. The unknowns are much more fun. Knowing where there are magnetic fields where there's no identifiable source, where the magnetic field for stars are unexpectedly strong or unexpectedly weak - that's where it gets really interesting. You can do a lot where data doesn't match the hypothesis. There's a lot less you can do when they do match and there's absolutely nothing you can do if you don't make any predictions at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This will dramatically improve the results for my interstellar Monarch butterfly tracking project that I recently launched.
1) Collect a bunch of butterflies
2) Make them little space suits
3) Improve lifespan by several orders of magnitude
4) Map galaxy's magnetic fields [CHECK]
5) ???
www.sci-ku.com
... how Information Field Theory, or IFT, could be applied to computer science ? Or to the totally clueless management above my current project ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
All google gave me was something like this:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=2m1r5m3b
"...that provide information about turbulence in the galactic gas..."
Really? It's bad enough when I fart, now we are spending millions to study space flatus?
... and no magnetic monopoles yet?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.