Magnetic fields inside out: deciphering the magnetic field role in the formation of young stars

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Magnetic fields are believed to play a crucial role during the formation and early evolution of stars. Some models show that magnetic fields have significant effects in preventing fragmentation of the parental cloud, slowing cloud collapse, influencing accretion discs, and feedback phenomena.
However the magnetic field parameters are still poorly constrained and so far, observations were carried out only in a limited number of sources, which prevents from building a complete scenario. We aim at investigating exhaustively the magnetic field role in young stars by combing for the first time high angular resolution observations of 3 different, independent magnetic field tracers (maser, dust, thermal molecular lines). We will use lead instruments, including ALMA and EVN, to observe a sample of young stars and we will interpret the magnetic field morphology in each of them with our pioneering models. Our approach guarantees the reliability of our results by excluding any source of contamination of our data. We will check the consistency of the magnetic field orientation across multiple spatial scales, evolutionary stages and wavelengths. This will be the best test to reveal the action of strong magnetic fields compared to other dynamical effects. We will obtain an unprecedented view of the magnetic fields in each source of our sample as we were performing a 3D tomography. The level of details that we will derive will clarify the magnetic field role in each step of star formation.