Pulsars and neutron stars/Pulsar rotation measures
Measuring pulsar rotation measures
editPulsar rotation measures (RMs) are measured by fitting the position angle of the linear polarization over a range of observing frequencies as:
where where is the observing frequency.
Measured pulsar RMs vary, in part, because of the Earth's ionosphere. This ionospheric correction can be estimated using the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model.