Filamentary Dust Polarization and the Morphology of Neutral Hydrogen Structures

Understand

Filamentary structures in neutral hydrogen (HI) emission are well aligned with the interstellar magnetic field, so HI emission morphology can be used to construct templates that strongly correlate with measurements of polarized thermal dust emission.

• We explore how the quantification of filament morphology affects this correlation.
• We introduce a new implementation of the Rolling Hough Transform (RHT) using spherical harmonic convolutions, which enables efficient quantification of filamentary structure on the sphere.
• We use this Spherical RHT algorithm along with a Hessian-based method to construct HI-based polarization templates.