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arXiv, 2020

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2012.04297

The Astrophysical Journal, 1(908), p. 10, 2021

DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/abd0fc

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Observations of Magnetic Fields Surrounding LkHα 101 Taken by the BISTRO Survey with JCMT-POL-2

Journal article published in 2021 by Sven van Loo ORCID, Nguyen Bich Ngoc ORCID, Pham Ngoc Diep ORCID, Harriet Parsons ORCID, Kate Pattle ORCID, Thiem Hoang ORCID, Derek Ward-Thompson ORCID, Le Ngoc Tram ORCID, Charles L. H. Hull ORCID, Ray Furuya ORCID, Pierre Bastien ORCID, Mehrnoosh Tahani ORCID, Keping Qiu ORCID, Tetsuo Hasegawa, Woojin Kwon ORCID 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 the first high spatial resolution measurement of magnetic fields surrounding LkH$α$ 101, a part of the Auriga-California molecular cloud. The observations were taken with the POL-2 polarimeter on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope within the framework of the B-fields In Star-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey. Observed polarization of thermal dust emission at 850 $μ$m is found to be mostly associated with the red-shifted gas component of the cloud. The magnetic field displays a relatively complex morphology. Two variants of the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method, unsharp masking and structure function, are used to calculate the strength of magnetic fields in the plane of the sky, yielding a similar result of $B_{\rm POS}∼ 115$ $\mathrmμ$G. The mass-to-magnetic-flux ratio in critical value units, $λ∼0.3$, is the smallest among the values obtained for other regions surveyed by POL-2. This implies that the LkH$α$ 101 region is sub-critical and the magnetic field is strong enough to prevent gravitational collapse. The inferred $δB/B_0∼ 0.3$ implies that the large scale component of the magnetic field dominates the turbulent one. The variation of the polarization fraction with total emission intensity can be fitted by a power-law with an index of $α=0.82±0.03$, which lies in the range previously reported for molecular clouds. We find that the polarization fraction decreases rapidly with proximity to the only early B star (LkH$α$ 101) in the region. The magnetic field tangling and the joint effect of grain alignment and rotational disruption by radiative torques are potential of explaining such a decreasing trend.