首页

Magnetic fields play a fundamental role in regulating the evolution of interstellar medium and star formation in the Milky Way. However, a comprehensive picture of the 3-dimensional magnetic fields in the Galactic 3-dimensional interstellar space remains unavailable. Spectral-line polarization arising from the Zeeman effect and Goldreich-Kylafis effect probes magnetic fields with velocity information, complementing continuum polarization techniques of dust polarization, Faraday rotation, and synchrotron polarization that have been widely used in large-scale Galactic magnetic field surveys. Zeeman effect is the most direct method to measure line-of-sight magnetic field strength, and Goldreich-Kylafis effect reveals the plane-of-sky magnetic field structure. By incorporating cloud distances derived from optical absorption-line surveys, the combination of Zeeman survey and Goldreich-Kylafis survey provides a promising method to map the 3-dimensional interstellar magnetic fields. Such a dataset would benefit frontier astrophysical topics, including the origin of Galactic magnetic fields, the driving mechanisms of the Fermi bubbles, and the removal of CMB foreground polarization.

BIO

Tao-Chung Ching (庆道冲) is a former Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He received his Ph.D. in 2017 from the Institute of Astronomy at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. During his doctoral studies, he was also a Predoctoral Fellow at CfA from 2013 to 2015. He worked in NAOC as a FAST Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017 to 2019 and as a Chinese Academy of Sciences Fellow of Taiwanese Young Talented Scholar from 2019 to early 2022. He later became a Research Fellow at Zhejiang Lab. He joined the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from September 2022 to September 2025.

He has participated in the polarization commissioning of several major radio telescopes, including SMA, JCMT, FAST, and ngVLA. His research interests are star formation and interstellar medium, with a particular focus on using radio polarization observations to study the role of magnetic field in the early phase of star formation.

Host: Cheng Zhao