Characterizing Magnetic Properties of Young Protostars in Orion
Abstract
The {\em B}-field Orion Protostellar Survey (BOPS) recently obtained polarimetric observations at 870 towards 61 protostars in the Orion molecular clouds with spatial resolution using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. From the BOPS sample, we selected the 26 protostars with extended polarized emission within a radius of (2400~au) around the protostar. This allows to have sufficient statistical polarization data to infer the magnetic field strength. The magnetic field strength is derived using the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method. The underlying magnetic field strengths are approximately 2.0~mG for protostars with a standard hourglass magnetic field morphology, which is higher than the values derived for protostars with rotated hourglass, spiral, and complex magnetic field configurations (~mG). This suggests that the magnetic field plays a more significant role in envelopes exhibiting a standard hourglass field morphology, and a value of mG would be required to maintain such a structure at these scales. Furthermore, most protostars in the sample are slightly supercritical, with mass-to-flux ratios . In particular, the mass-to-flux ratios for all protostars with a standard hourglass magnetic field morphology are lower than 3.0. However, these ratios do not account for the contribution of the protostellar mass, which means they are likely significantly underestimated.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.14726,
title = {Characterizing Magnetic Properties of Young Protostars in Orion},
author = {Bo Huang and Josep M. Girart and Ian W. Stephens and Philip C. Myers and Qizhou Zhang and Paulo Cortés and Álvaro Sánchez-Monge and Manuel Fernández-López and Valentine J. M. Le Gouellec and Tom Megeath and Nadia M. Murillo and John M. Carpenter and Zhi-Yun Li and Junhao Liu and Leslie W. Looney and Sarah Sadavoy and Nicole Karnath and Woojin Kwon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.14726},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
12 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables (accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal)