1 research outputs found
Correlating the interstellar magnetic field with protostellar jets and its sources
This article combines new CCD polarimetric data with previous information
about protostellar objects in a search for correlations involving the
interstellar magnetic field. Specifically, we carried out an optical
polarimetric study of a sample of 28 fields of 10 X 10 arcmin^2 located in the
neighborhood of protostellar jets and randomly spread over the Galaxy. The
polarimetry of a large number of field stars is used to estimate both the
average and dispersion of the interstellar magnetic field (ISMF) direction in
each region. The results of the applied statistical tests are as follows.
Concerning the alignment between the jet direction and the interstellar
magnetic field, the whole sample does not show alignment. There is, however, a
statistically significant alignment for objects of Classes 0 and I. Regarding
the interstellar magnetic field dispersion, our sample presents values slightly
larger for regions containing T Tauri objects than for those harboring younger
protostars. Moreover the ISMF dispersion in regions containing high-mass
objects tends to be larger than in those including only low-mass protostars. In
our sample, the mean interstellar polarization as a function of the average
interstellar extinction in a region reaches a maximum value around 3% for A(V)
= 5, after which it decreases. Our data also show a clear correlation of the
mean value of the interstellar polarization with the dispersion of the
interstellar magnetic field: the larger the dispersion, the smaller the
polarization. Based on a comparison of our and previous results, we suggest
that the dispersion in regions forming stars is larger than in quiescent
regions.Comment: ApJ accepte