RECENT PROGRESS WITH OBSERVATIONS AND MODELS TO CHARACTERIZE DUST AND MAGNETIC FIELDS SURROUNDING YOUNG STELLAR OBJECTS

Anaëlle Maury –  CEA Saclay

In this talk, I will provide a global outlook on the progresses made in the recent years to characterize the role of magnetic fields during the embedded phases of the star formation process. Thanks to the development of observational capabilities and the parallel progress in numerical models, capturing most of the important physics at work during star formation; it has recently become possible to confront detailed predictions of magnetized models to observational properties of the youngest protostars. I will show how comparing observations of the magnetic fields in young protostars to synthetic observations from non-ideal MHD models allowed us to put significant constraints on the key role of magnetic fields for star and disk formation, and propose a scenario solving the angular momentum for star formation, also highlighting the remaining tensions that exist between models and observations. To conclude, I will discuss the importance of magnetic field coupling to set the efficiency of magnetic processes and present recent observational works putting constraints on the two main agents responsible for the coupling in star-forming cores: dust grains and ionized gas.

Reference from our review paper: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022FrASS…9.9223M/abstract