Magnetic fields in galactic environments probed by Fast Radio Bursts

Abstract

FRBs constitute a unique probe of various astrophysical and cosmological environments via their characteristic dispersion and rotation (RM) measures that encode information about the ionized gas traversed by the FRB sightlines. In this work, we analyse observed RM measured for 14 localized FRBs at $0.05 \lesssim z \lesssim 0.5$, to infer total magnetic fields in various galactic environments. Additionally, we calculate $f_{\rm gas}$ - the average fraction of halo baryons in the ionized CGM. We build a spectroscopic dataset of FRB foreground galaxy halos, acquired with VLT/MUSE and FLIMFLAM survey. We develop a novel Bayesian algorithm and use it to correlate the individual intervening halos with the observed RM. This approach allows us to disentangle the magnetic fields present in various environments traversed by the FRB. Our analysis yields the first direct FRB constraints on the strength of magnetic fields in the ISM and halos of the FRB host galaxies, as well as in halos of foreground galaxies. We find that the average magnetic field in the ISM of FRB hosts is $B_{\rm host}^{\rm local} = 5.44^{+1.13}_{-0.87}μ{\rm G}$. Additionally, we place upper limits on average magnetic field in FRB host halos, $B_{\rm host}^{\rm halo} < 4.81μ{\rm G}$, and in foreground intervening halos, $B_{\rm f/g}^{\rm halo} < 4.31μ{\rm G}$. Moreover, we estimate the average fraction of cosmic baryons inside $10 \lesssim \log_{10} \left( M_{\rm halo} / M_{\odot}\right) \lesssim 13.1$ halos $f_{\rm gas} = 0.45^{+0.21}_{-0.19}$. We find that the magnetic fields inferred in this work are in good agreement with previous measurements. In contrast to previous studies that analysed FRB RMs and have not considered contributions from the halos of the foreground and/or FRB host galaxies, we show that they can contribute a non-negligible amount of RM and must be taken into account when analysing future FRB samples.