Magnetic Misalignment of Interstellar Dust Filaments

Abstract

We present evidence for scale-independent misalignment of interstellar dust filaments and magnetic fields. We estimate the misalignment by comparing millimeter-wave dust-polarization measurements from Planck with filamentary structures identified in neutral-hydrogen (H i) measurements from Hi4PI. We find that the misalignment angle displays a scale independence (harmonic coherence) for features larger than the Hi4PI beamwidth (16.′2). We additionally find a spatial coherence on angular scales of . We present several misalignment estimators formed from the auto- and cross-spectra of dust-polarization and H i-based maps, and we also introduce a map-space estimator. Applied to large regions of the high-Galactic-latitude sky, we find a global misalignment angle of ∼2°, which is robust to a variety of masking choices. By dividing the sky into small regions, we show that the misalignment angle correlates with the parity-violating TB cross-spectrum measured in the Planck dust maps. The misalignment paradigm also predicts a dust EB signal, which is of relevance in the search for cosmic birefringence but as yet undetected; the measurements of EB are noisier than those of TB, and our correlations of EB with misalignment angle are found to be weaker and less robust to masking choices. We also introduce an H i-based dust-polarization template constructed from the Hessian matrix of the H i intensity, which is found to correlate more strongly than previous templates with Planck dust B modes.