Statistical Investigation of B-fields in Cores and Filaments Using JCMT/SCUPOL Legacy Survey Archival Data

TL;DR

This study statistically analyzes magnetic field properties in star-forming cores and filaments using archival polarization data from JCMT/SCUPOL and CARMA, revealing insights into magnetic field morphology and its relation to outflows.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical investigation of magnetic field orientations and their correlation with outflows across multiple star-forming regions using large archival datasets.

Findings

Magnetic field orientations vary across regions and scales.

Correlation between outflow directions and magnetic fields is observed.

Statistical properties of magnetic fields in cores and filaments are characterized.

Abstract

SCUPOL, the polarimeter for SCUBA on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), was used for polarization observations of 104 regions at 850 micron wavelength and 15 arcsec resolution in the mapping mode by Matthews et al. (2009). They presented the polarization values and magnetic field morphologies in these regions. In this work, we took the opportunity to use this big legacy survey data to investigate further the collective statistical properties of the measured polarization in different star-forming regions containing cores and filaments. We did not reproduce the polarization maps but used the polarization value catalogs to investigate the statistics of distributions. In some of these regions, the data from the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) polarization observation at 1.3 mm wavelength and 2.5 arcsec resolution were also available from the TADPOL survey (Hull et al., 2014). We used that data and compared it with JCMT/SCUPOL values. We also study how the direction of outflows appears to relate to the mean B-field direction from large scale (JCMT observation at 15 arcsec) to small scale (CARMA observation at 2.5 arcsec) for the nine core regions common in both.