English

ALMA's Polarized View of 10 Protostars in the Perseus Molecular Cloud

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2018-03-28 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present 870 μ\mum ALMA dust polarization observations of 10 young Class 0/I protostars in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. At \sim 0.35"" (80 au) resolution, all of our sources show some degree of polarization, with most (9/10) showing significantly extended emission in the polarized continuum. Each source has incredibly intricate polarization signatures. In particular, all three disk-candidates have polarization vectors roughly along the minor axis, which is indicative of polarization produced by dust scattering. On \sim 100 au scales, the polarization is at a relatively low level (1%\lesssim 1\%) and is quite ordered. In sources with significant envelope emission, the envelope is typically polarized at a much higher (5%\gtrsim 5\%) level and has a far more disordered morphology. We compute the cumulative probability distributions for both the small (disk-scale) and large (envelope-scale) polarization percentage. We find that the two are intrinsically different, even after accounting for the different detection thresholds in the high/low surface brightness regions. We perform Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Anderson-Darling tests on the distributions of angle offsets of the polarization from the outflow axis. We find disk-candidate sources are different from the non-disk-candidate sources. We conclude that the polarization on the 100 au scale is consistent with the signature of dust scattering for disk-candidates and that the polarization on the envelope-scale in all sources may come from another mechanism, most likely magnetically aligned grains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.00449,
  title  = {ALMA's Polarized View of 10 Protostars in the Perseus Molecular Cloud},
  author = {Erin G. Cox and Robert J. Harris and Leslie W. Looney and Zhi-Yun Li and Haifeng Yang and John J. Tobin and Ian Stephens},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00449},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

13 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ