Abstract
This chapter presents a review of observational studies to determine the magnetic field in the Milky Way, both in the disk and in the halo, focused on recent developments and on magnetic fields in the diffuse interstellar medium. I discuss some terminology which is confusingly or inconsistently used and try to summarize current status of our knowledge on magnetic field configurations and strengths in the Milky Way. Although many open questions still exist, more and more conclusions can be drawn on the large-scale and small-scale components of the Galactic magnetic field. The chapter is concluded with a brief outlook to observational projects in the near future.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that Jaffe et al. (2010) refer to this component as ‘ordered’.
- 2.
Sometimes called disymmetric (Jansson et al. 2009).
- 3.
Since RM fluctuations and synchrotron depolarization trace the isotropic random field and the parallel component of the ordered random field (see Fig. 17.1), the strengths cited are a combination of these two components.
- 4.
Two separate definitions of the Galactic halo with respect to the thick disk cause some confusion: The Galactic halo is regularly referred to as the region above the thick disk. However, in a second common use of the term Galactic halo it is equal to the thick disk. We use here the second definition, where the halo is equal to the thick disk.
- 5.
NRAO VLA Sky Survey (Condon et al. 1998).
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Acknowledgements
The author wants to express her sincere thanks to Katia Ferrière and George Heald for critically reading and commenting on the manuscript, to Philip Kronberg for discussion about details of spiral arms pitch angles, to Jo-Anne Brown, Tess Jaffe, Aris Noutsos, and Cameron van Eck for kindly giving permission to use their figures and useful comments and discussion. This work is part of the research programme 639.042.915, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
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Haverkorn, M. (2015). Magnetic Fields in the Milky Way. In: Lazarian, A., de Gouveia Dal Pino, E., Melioli, C. (eds) Magnetic Fields in Diffuse Media. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 407. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44625-6_17
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