We present new Submillimeter Array (SMA) observations of CO(2-1) outflows toward young, embedded protostars in the Perseus molecular cloud as part of the Mass Assembly of Stellar Systems and their Evolution with the SMA (MASSES) survey. For 57 Perseus protostars, we characterize the orientation of the outflow angles and compare them with the orientation of the local filaments as derived from Herschel observations. We find that the relative angles between outflows and filaments are inconsistent with purely parallel or purely perpendicular distributions. Instead, the observed distribution of outflow-filament angles are more consistent with either randomly aligned angles or a mix of projected parallel and perpendicular angles. A mix of parallel and perpendicular angles requires perpendicular alignment to be more common by a factor of ∼3. Our results show that the observed distributions probably hold regardless of the protostar's multiplicity, age, or the host core's opacity. These observations indicate that the angular momentum axis of a protostar may be independent of the large-scale structure. We discuss the significance of independent protostellar rotation axes in the general picture of filament-based star formation.
@article{arxiv.1707.08122,
title = {Alignment Between Protostellar Outflows and Filamentary Structure},
author = {Ian W. Stephens and Michael M. Dunham and Philip C. Myers and Riwaj Pokhrel and Sarah I. Sadavoy and Eduard I. Vorobyov and John J. Tobin and Jaime E. Pineda and Stella S. R. Offner and Katherine I. Lee and Lars E. Kristensen and Jes K. Jørgensen and Alyssa A. Goodman and Tyler L. Bourke and Héctor G. Arce and Adele L. Plunkett},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.08122},
year = {2017}
}