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A.J. Beasley (NRAO), EVLA Science Team
Magnetic fields are thought to be important in virtually all astrophysical contexts, but they are difficult to observe. Radio observations offer some of the few direct probes of the strength, structure, and topology of magnetic fields, including synchrotron emission, Zeeman splitting, and Faraday rotation. The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) will be an extremely sensitive instrument for measuring the distribution of total and polarized emission in radio sources in the centimeter and millimeter wavelength bands, enabling studies of a wide variety of the objects and properties of the Magnetic Universe. Complete accessibility to all frequencies between 1 and 50 GHz will be available, permitting polarization imaging to be done at the frequencies that are most relevant for a particular astrophysical problem. This will be particularly crucial for studies of Faraday rotation. The EVLA will allow astronomers to pursue investigations such as mapping out the three-dimensional structure of magnetic fields on the Sun, imaging the polarized emission in thousands of spiral galaxies, and (through the use of faint background sources as Faraday rotation probes) tracing the magnetic fields in the halos of individual galaxy clusters.
NRAO is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreeement by Associated Universities Inc.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tbeasley@nrao.edu