The Fan Region at 1.5 GHz with GMIMS: Polarized synchrotron emission tracing Galactic structure

Diffuse polarized radio continuum emission provides information about the structure of the Galactic magnetic field. With the Global Magneto-Ionic Medium Survey (GMIMS), we are mapping this emission from the entire sky from 300 to 1800 MHz. We will present a brief overview of the GMIMS survey.We will focus on 1270-1750 MHz observations from the Northern hemisphere GMIMS data to determine the geometry of the magnetic field in the Fan Region. The Fan Region is one of the dominant features of the sky in polarized radio continuum, long thought to be a local (d < 500 pc) synchrotron emission feature. We find that the 1.5 GHz polarized radio emission is anti-correlated with Halpha emission from the Perseus Arm, 2 kpc away. This indicates that ionized gas in the Perseus Arm depolarizes about 30% of the Fan Region emission, indicating that some of the Fan Region emission originates in or beyond the Perseus Arm. The synchrotron emission must therefore be produced along a large path length, suggesting the presence of a coherent magnetic field in the plane in the outer Galaxy. We argue that the polarized emission from the Fan Region is a consequence of the structure of the Galactic magnetic field and ISM. We model beam depolarization due to the ISM, finding that in the presence of depolarization the rotation measure measured from polarized emission is much lower than that measured towards background point sources, explaining an observed discrepancy between the GMIMS rotation measures and background rotation measures.