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Magnetically Aligned HI Fibers and the Rolling Hough Transform

7 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

7 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We present observations of a new group of structures in the diffuse Galactic ISM: slender, linear HI features we dub "fibers" that extend for many degrees at high Galactic latitude. To characterize and measure the extent and strength of these fibers, we present the Rolling Hough Transform (RHT), a new machine vision method for parameterizing the coherent linearity of structures in the image plane. With this powerful new tool we show the fibers are oriented along the interstellar magnetic field as probed by starlight polarization. We find that these low column density (N(HI) ~ 5 x 10^18 cm^-2) fiber features are most likely a component of the local cavity wall, about 100 pc away. The HI data we use to demonstrate this alignment at high latitude are from the Galactic Arecibo L-Band Feed Array HI (GALFA-HI) Survey and the Parkes Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS). We find better alignment in the higher resolution GALFA-HI data, where the fibers are more visually evident. This trend continues in our investigation of magnetically aligned linear features in the Riegel-Crutcher HI cold cloud, detected in the Southern Galactic Plane Survey (SGPS). We propose an application of the RHT for estimating the field strength in such a cloud, based on the Chandrasekhar-Fermi method. We conclude that data-driven, quantitative studies of ISM morphology can be very powerful predictors of underlying physical quantities.

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astro-ph.GA 7

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B-Fields and Star Formation across Scales with TRAO (B-FROST): CO Abundances, Dynamics and Relative Orientations in the Translucent High Latitude Cloud MBM12

astro-ph.GA · 2026-05-20 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Observational study of MBM12 shows CO-to-H2 conversion factor near galactic average with density-dependent variations, high virial parameters decreasing at small scales, broken power-law mass-size relations indicating external pressure, and magnetic field orientation transition at N(H2) = 4.5e21 cm-

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