Synchrotron Intensity Gradients as Tracers of Interstellar Magnetic Fields

Abstract

On the basis of the modern understanding of MHD turbulence, we propose a new way of using synchrotron radiation: using synchrotron intensity gradients (SIGs) for tracing astrophysical magnetic fields. We successfully test the new technique using synthetic data obtained with 3D MHD simulations and provide the demonstration of the practical utility of the technique by comparing the directions of magnetic fields that are obtained with PLANCK synchrotron intensity data to the directions obtained with PLANCK synchrotron polarization data. We demonstrate that the SIGs can reliably trace magnetic fields in the presence of noise and can provide detailed maps of magnetic field directions. We also show that the SIGs are relatively robust for tracing magnetic fields while the low spatial frequencies of the synchrotron image are removed. This makes the SIGs applicable to the tracing of magnetic fields using interferometric data with single-dish measurement absent. We discuss the synergy of using the SIGs together with synchrotron polarization in order to find the actual direction of the magnetic fields and quantify the effects of Faraday rotation as well as with other ways of studying astrophysical magnetic fields. We test our method in the presence of noise and the resolution effects. We stress the complementary nature of the studies using the SIG technique and those employing the recently introduced velocity gradient techniques that trace magnetic fields using spectroscopic data.