English

Characterizing Magnetic Properties of Young Protostars in Orion

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-03-20 v1

Abstract

The {\em B}-field Orion Protostellar Survey (BOPS) recently obtained polarimetric observations at 870 μm{\rm \mu m} towards 61 protostars in the Orion molecular clouds with 1\sim 1^{\prime\prime} 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 6\sim 6^{\prime\prime} (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 (1.0\lesssim1.0~mG). This suggests that the magnetic field plays a more significant role in envelopes exhibiting a standard hourglass field morphology, and a value of 2.0\gtrsim2.0 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 3.0\lesssim3.0. 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.

Keywords

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)