Was the Wait Worth It?

A piece of the 10% has finally been produced! It is an overlay of histograms to show the degree to which NVSS sources are polarized, broken down into groups of total brightness. The y-axis is the fraction of total sources (1 = all sources ) while the x-axis is the percentage of polarization (1 = 100%).

It may not look like much, but it actually tells me that only the dimmest NVSS radio sources are likely to be highly polarized. Which is thankfully a useful result. Yippy skippy.

To see this, note the striking difference between the neon green histogram and the black histogram. The neon green represents the dimmest group of radio sources (less than 10 mJy) and the black represents the brightest (over 1000 mJy). The units of brightness (mJy for milliJansky) are the standard when talking about radio emission. A Jansky is the basic unit, named after Mr. Jansky, naturally, but most of my sources are ten to a thousand times dimmer - hence the milli (or 10^-3 for those of you who partial to scientifc notation). Anyway, the plot clearly shows that the dimmer sources are more likely to be more polarized, whereas very few of the brighter sources are more than 10% polarized.

Now onto further investigations...