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arXiv, 2019

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1902.07734

The Astrophysical Journal, 1(877), p. 43, 2019

DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab0958

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The JCMT BISTRO Survey: The Magnetic Field in the Starless Core ρ Ophiuchus C

Journal article published in 2019 by Junhao Liu ORCID, Keping Qiu ORCID, David Berry, James Di Francesco ORCID, Francesco, Pierre Bastien ORCID, Patrick M. Koch ORCID, Ray S. Furuya ORCID, Kee-Tae Kim ORCID, K.-T. Kim, Simon Coudé ORCID, Chang Won Lee ORCID, Archana Soam ORCID, Chakali Eswaraiah ORCID, Jihye Hwang and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

We report 850~$μ$m dust polarization observations of a low-mass ($∼$12 $M_{⊙}$) starless core in the $ρ$ Ophiuchus cloud, Ophiuchus C, made with the POL-2 instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) as part of the JCMT B-fields In STar-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey. We detect an ordered magnetic field projected on the plane of sky in the starless core. The magnetic field across the $∼$0.1~pc core shows a predominant northeast-southwest orientation centering between $∼$40$^∘$ to $∼$100$^∘$, indicating that the field in the core is well aligned with the magnetic field in lower-density regions of the cloud probed by near-infrared observations and also the cloud-scale magnetic field traced by Planck observations. The polarization percentage ($P$) decreases with an increasing total intensity ($I$) with a power-law index of $-$1.03 $±$ 0.05. We estimate the plane-of-sky field strength ($B_{\mathrm{pos}}$) using modified Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi (DCF) methods based on structure function (SF), auto-correlation (ACF), and unsharp masking (UM) analyses. We find that the estimates from the SF, ACF, and UM methods yield strengths of 103 $±$ 46 $μ$G, 136 $±$ 69 $μ$G, and 213 $±$ 115 $μ$G, respectively. Our calculations suggest that the Ophiuchus C core is near magnetically critical or slightly magnetically supercritical (i.e. unstable to collapse). The total magnetic energy calculated from the SF method is comparable to the turbulent energy in Ophiuchus C, while the ACF method and the UM method only set upper limits for the total magnetic energy because of large uncertainties.