Oral Presentation

What are we learning from the relative orientation between density structures and the magnetic field in molecular clouds?

Author(s): Juan D. Soler, P. Hennebelle

Presenter: Juan Diego Soler (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Novel observations of polarization from dust, in emission at submillimeter wavelengths and in absorption from background stars in the visible and near-infrared, provide an unprecedented amount of information on the magnetic field orientation integrated along the line of sight and projected on the plane of the sky. However, integrating these observations to our understanding of the role of the magnetic field in the interstellar medium (ISM) is not straightforward.
I will present a review of the recent polarization observations by Planck and BLASTPol, describing the analysis techniques and the interpretation of their results in terms of the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in the ISM.