AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 81 ISM: From Dark to Blinded
Poster, Tuesday, 9:20am-6:30pm, January 10, 2006, Exhibit Hall

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[81.08] The Relationship Between Pulsar Dispersion Measures and Interstellar H-alpha Intensities at High Galactic Latitude

A. S. Hill (University of Wisconsin-Madison), R. A. Benjamin (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater), R. J. Reynolds, L. M. Haffner (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

We have used H-alpha surveys with large combined sky coverage and high latitude pulsars dispersion measures (DM) to investigate the relationship between integrated electron column densities, DM = \int0D ne ds, and emission measures, EM = \int ne2 ds, through the Galactic disk. Eight high latitude globular clusters with |z| > 3 kpc are currently known to contain pulsars, which therefore provide measurements of total electron columns and constrain the density and filling fraction of the diffuse ionized component of the interstellar medium. Data toward a much larger sample of high latitude Galactic disk pulsars reveal a correlation between DM and EM, suggesting that the faint regions of H-alpha enhancement that are superposed on the more diffuse H-alpha background are ionized regions with electron densities near 0.3 cm-3. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation through AST 0204973.


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