Within the interstellar medium, supernovae are thought to be the prevailing agents in driving turbulence. Until recently, their effects on magnetic field amplification in disk galaxies remained uncertain. Analytical models based on the uncorrelated-ensemble approach predicted that any created field would be expelled from the disk before it could be amplified significantly. By means of direct si...

Observations of the weak polarization of light from nearby stars, reported by Tinbergen (1982), are consistent with polarization by small, radius<0.14 μm, interstellar dust grains entrained in the magnetic wall of the heliosphere. The region of maximum polarization is towards ecliptic coordinates (λ,β)∼(295,0), corresponding to (l,b) = (20,–21), while the dust cone direction shows a marginally ...

This paper describes results of magnetic field measurements of white dwarfs carried out on the 6–m telescope for the last years. A magnetic field of about Be ≈ 28 kG has been discovered in the degenerate star WD1953–011 which has been selected from high–resolution spectroscopy of non–LTE Hα core by Koester et al. (1998). A rotational period of WD0009+501, 1.83 hours, has been discovered, the av...

Context. Irregular galaxies usually are smaller and less massive when compared to the spiral, S0 and elliptical counterparts. The radio observations show that the magnetic field in irregular galaxies is present and its value reaches the same level as in spiral galaxies. However the conditions in the medium of irregular galaxy are very unfavorable for amplification of the magnetic field due to s...

A flare of OH maser emission was discovered in W75N in 2000. Its location was determined with the VLBA to be within 110 au from one of the ultra-compact H II regions, VLA2. The flare consisted of several maser spots. Four of the spots were found to form Zeeman pairs, all of them with a magnetic field strength of about 40 mG. This is the highest ever magnetic field strength found in OH masers , ...

Population of levels of the hyperfine and fine split ground state of an atom is affected by radiative transitions induced by anisotropic radiation flux. Such aligned atoms precess in the external magnetic field and this affects properties of polarized radiation arising from both scattering and absorption by atoms. As the result the degree of light polarization depends on the direction of the ma...

We discuss a new technique of studying magnetic fields in diffuse astrophysical media, e.g. interstellar and intergalactic gas/plasma. This technique is based on the angular momentum alignment of atoms and ions in their ground or metastable states. As the life-time of atoms in such states is long, the alignment induced by anisotropic radiation is susceptible to weak magnetic fields (1G ∼ > B ∼ ...

The very weak polarization of light from nearby stars reaches a maximum near the ecliptic plane in a position offset by λ ∼ 35 from the heliosphere nose direction. The position angle for the polarization in this ecliptic-plane peak is the same for near and distant stars, to within uncertainties, indicating the interstellar magnetic field direction is relatively constant over several hundred par...

Low error measurements at the Arecibo Observatory (at 318MHz) of the weighted average interstellar magnetic field projected on the line of sight 〈B‖〉 and of the Rotation Measure in the direction of several pulsars were done using a new method. This method is based on the measurement of the period of the temporal modulation in the linearly polarized component of the pulsar pulse observed in a wi...