Oral Presentation

Using SOFIA to Connect the Large and Small Scale Magnetic Fields in the IRAS 4 Region

Author(s): Erin Cox (U. of Illinois); Leslie Looney (U. of Illinois); Robert Harris (U. of Illinois); Dominque Segura-Cox (MPIE); Zhi-Yun Li (U. of Virginia); Giles Novak (Northwestern); Fabio Pereira Santos (Northwestern); Darren Dowell (JPL); Ian Stephens (CfA)

Presenter: Erin Cox (University of Illinois)

Magnetic fields are ubiquitous in space and are seen threading regions associated with star formation, particularly large filaments and clouds. We know that these fields are important on all size scales— from the initial collapse of the protostar to disk formation. Observationally, magnetic fields are beginning to be detected via dust polarization on all these size scales as well. The SOFIA polarimeter HAWC+ has the ability to probe the magnetic fields at scales of ~ a few thousand au. We used HAWC+ to observe the 214µm dust continuum polarization in the region of IRAS4. We present these observations, showing the inferred magnetic field of the area surrounding the protostars IRAS2, IRAS4A, IRAS4B, IRAS4C, and SVS 13. These are the first observations of their kind, as they probe the magnetic field in a relatively uncharted area of a protostar at ~4000 au and provide an avenue for future polarization studies of this area. This new data allows us to tie together the previous observations of the disk-scale polarization of the source IRAS4A from both ALMA at 3 mm  and the VLA at 8 mm. Ultimately these observations allow us to create a multi-wavelength and multi-scale view of the inferred magnetic field surrounding a young protostar.