Oral Presentation

Determining Magnetic Field Morphologies in Young Stellar Disks and their Environments with CanariCam 10-micron Polarimetry at the 10-m Gran Telescopio Canarias

Author(s): C. Telesco (Florida); P. Barnes (Florida); S. Fernández-Acosta (GTC); T. Hoang (Korea ASI); A. Li (Missouri); D. Li (Pennsylvania); E. Lopez-Rodriguez (Texas); C. Packham (UTSA); E. Pantin (CNRS); P. Roche (Oxford); C. Wright (UNSW); H. Zhang (Florida)

Presenter: Charles Telesco (University of Florida)

CanariCam is the facility multi-mode mid-IR camera on the 10-m GTC on La Palma, Spain. The polarimetric mode is proving to be an outstanding probe of the magnetic fields in the disks and environments of young stars at angular resolutions at, or near, the diffraction limit of 0.3 arcsec. We present highlights of the GTC polarimetry of selected Herbig Ae/Be stellar disks, YSOs, and the central few parsecs of the Milky Way Galaxy. These results include the first angular resolution of the magnetic field associated with the disk of the archetype Herbig star AB Aur. Especially for YSOs, our mid-IR results demonstrate the promise of polarimetric tomography, the capability to probe B-field structure along the line of sight in addition to that in the plane of the sky. We also present the first detection of interstellar polarization from PAHs. This research has been supported in part by NSF grants AST-0908624, AST-0903672, and AST-1515331 to CMT.