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GR: Fachverband Gravitation, Relativistische Astrophysik und Kosmologie
GR 5: Relativistic Astrophysics I
GR 5.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 17:00–17:15, KH 01.016
mw-atlas: Bayesian reconstruction of the magnetic field from synchrotron emission — •Richa Halder1 and Philipp Mertsch2 — 1RWTH Aachen University — 2RWTH Aachen University
This project aims to build a 3D map of the Galactic magnetic field of the Milky Way from synchrotron emission, using a fully Bayesian framework. The magnetic field shapes cosmic-ray propagation, regulates interstellar gas and star formation, and distorts the signals used in precision cosmology, so its 3D structure must be known to interpret many astrophysical observations correctly. We use NIFTy, a variational inference framework, to infer the magnetic field from synchrotron data for a given distribution of cosmic-ray electrons. This provides full posterior distributions instead of single best-fit parameter sets, so uncertainties are explicitly quantified and can be propagated into other, derived quantities. Compared to previous reconstructions based on low-dimensional parametric GMF models fitted to integrated observables, our approach allows far more flexible field geometries, reduces bias from mis-specified parametric forms, and will be tested both on realistic simulations and future observational datasets.
Keywords: Bayesian inference; Gaussian process; Magnetic field; Information field theory