Funded by NSF awards to Northwestern University and to The University of Chicago; and by NSERC awards to The University of Western Ontario.
 

 

 

 
The CSO polarimeter, SHARP
The ten-meter Caltech Submillimeter
Observatory (CSO) on Mauna Kea
 
"Source Average" B-field map
superposed on model field lines
 
 
 
SHARP Update


June 2013

A key project for SHARP is to map magnetic fields in isolated cloud cores contaning single low-mass Class 0 protostars, for the purpose of testing star formation models.  The second paper from our ongoing survey of such sources was recently accepted by the Astrophysical Journal.  In this paper (Chapman et al. 2013) we analyze SHARP data for seven protostellar cores, and find evidence of a positive correlation between the symmetry axes of the flattened infall envelopes in these sources and the corresponding core magnetic field directions. 

The figure at top right of this page (adapted from the Chapman et al. paper) shows a magnetic field map made by combining SHARP data from the six edge-on cores in our survey.  This "source-average" map (red vectors) is shown superposed on field lines (grey) and density structure (blue/green) from a magnetized collapse model by Allen, Li, and Shu (2003).

Click here to access the Chapman et al. (2013) paper and other SHARP papers.