No impact of core-scale magnetic field, turbulence, or velocity gradient on sizes of protostellar disks in Orion A

TL;DR

This study finds no significant correlation between protostellar disk sizes in Orion A and core-scale magnetic fields, turbulence, or velocity gradients, supporting the importance of non-ideal MHD effects in disk formation.

Contribution

It provides observational evidence that disk sizes are not strongly affected by core-scale magnetic or turbulent properties, highlighting the role of non-ideal MHD processes.

Findings

No significant dependence of disk size on magnetic field or turbulence.

Positive correlation between velocity gradient magnitude and non-thermal line width.

Results support non-ideal MHD simulations over turbulence-only models.

Abstract

We compared the sizes and fluxes of a sample of protostellar disks in Orion A measured with the ALMA 0.87 mm continuum data from the VANDAM survey with the physical properties of their ambient environments on the core scale of 0.6 pc estimated with the GBT GAS NH3 and JCMT SCUPOL polarimetric data. We did not find any significant dependence of the disk radii and continuum fluxes on a single parameter on the core scale, such as the non-thermal line width, magnetic field orientation and strength, or magnitude and orientation of the velocity gradient. Among these parameters, we only found a positive correlation between the magnitude of the velocity gradient and the non-thermal line width. Thus, the observed velocity gradients are more likely related to turbulent motion but not large-scale rotation. Our results of no clear dependence of the disk radii on these parameters are more consistent with the expectation from non-ideal MHD simulations of disk formation in collapsing cores, where the disk size is self-regulated by magnetic braking and diffusion, compared to other simulations which only include turbulence and/or a magnetic field misaligned with the rotational axis. Therefore, our results could hint that the non-ideal MHD effects play a more important role in the disk formation. Nevertheless, we cannot exclude the influences on the observed disk size distribution by dynamical interaction in a stellar cluster or amounts of angular momentum on the core scale, which cannot be probed with the current data.