SOFIA/HAWC+ Compendium: Far-Infrared Polarization Maps of Nearby Star-Forming Regions

A collection of far-infrared polarization maps from the SOFIA/HAWC+ instrument, covering nearby galactic star-forming regions. The data includes FITS files containing Stokes I, Q, and U parameters, their errors, and derived percent polarization and angle. The collection is associated with the paper 'Far-infrared Polarization Properties of Nearby Star-Forming Regions: A New Compendium of SOFIA/HAWC+ Observations' by Karpovich et al., and was last updated on March 17, III.

Use Cases

• Analyzing magnetic field orientations in star-forming clouds based on polarization angle data.
• Modeling dust grain alignment physics based on percent polarization and Stokes parameters.
• Comparing star-formation properties across different regions using the provided distance and reference metadata.
• Training machine learning models for astronomical image segmentation using the FITS map data.

Strengths

• Data is at the native resolution of the HAWC+ instrument, preserving observational fidelity.
• Includes derived physical parameters (percent polarization and angle) calculated by the data reduction pipeline.
• Supplemental CSV file provides contextual metadata like region distance and references for each dataset.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale statistical analysis.

Provenance

Source

SOFIA Archive, processed by the HAWC+ instrument team.

Collection Method

Observational data from the SOFIA airborne telescope.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-17 23:22:14; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Nearby galactic star-forming regions.