THE Q/U IMAGING EXPERIMENT: POLARIZATION MEASUREMENTS OF RADIO SOURCES AT 43 AND 95 GHz

Abstract

We present polarization measurements of extragalactic radio sources observed during the cosmic microwave background polarization survey of the Q/U Imaging Experiment (QUIET), operating at 43 GHz (Q-band) and 95GHz (W-band). We examine sources selected at 20 GHz from the public, >40 mJy catalog of the Australia Telescope (AT20G) survey. There are similar to 480 such sources within QUIET’s four low-foreground survey patches, including the nearby radio galaxies Centaurus A and Pictor A. The median error on our polarized flux density measurements is 30-40 mJy per Stokes parameter. At signal-to-noise ratio >3 significance, we detect linear polarization for seven sources in Q-band and six in W-band; only 1.3 +/- 1.1 detections per frequency band are expected by chance. For sources without a detection of polarized emission, we find that half of the sources have polarization amplitudes below 90 mJy (Q-band) and 106 mJy (W-band), at 95% confidence. Finally, we compare our polarization measurements to intensity and polarization measurements of the same sources from the literature. For the four sources with WMAP and Planck intensity measurements >1 Jy, the polarization fractions are above 1% in both QUIET bands. At high significance, we compute polarization fractions as much as 10%-20% for some sources, but the effects of source variability may cut that level in half for contemporaneous comparisons. Our results indicate that simple models-ones that scale a fixed polarization fraction with frequency-are inadequate to model the behavior of these sources and their contributions to polarization maps.