Study of Radio and Optical Polarization Anisotropies in the Electromagnetic Waves from Extragalactic Sources

Abstract

Polarizations of electromagnetic radiation from active galactic nuclei (AGN) show some interesting effects such as the existence of a global anisotropy in the orientations of the radio wave polarizations from distant radio galaxies and quasars and a very large scale alignment of optical polarizations of quasars. We studied in detail whether the observational bias in the data would have led to these efects. We propose that the existence of a hypothetical pseudoscalar explains these effects.