Magnetic field alignment with dense cores in the transition between cloud and core scales

Abstract

In a magnetically-dominated model of star formation, we expect to see alignments between the magnetic field orientation of star-forming dense cores and the cloud-scale magnetic field. Pandhi et al. (2023) showed instead, however, that the orientation of cores and their angular momentum vectors appear random with respect to the larger-scale magnetic field, implying that magnetic fields may play a diminished role in core formation and evolution. Here, we use higher-resolution dust polarization data from the B-Fields In Star-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) to investigate the change in the magnetic field orientation from cloud scales to core scales, and reassess any correlations between core-scale magnetic fields, core orientations and core velocity gradients. We produce a catalog of 79 cores over 14 star-forming regions with averaged core-scale magnetic field orientations. We find that the core-scale magnetic field is more disordered compared to the cloud-scale field, as measured by an increased standard deviation in the magnetic field vector orientations. Alignment between the core-scale and cloud-scale field varies greatly between regions. Our results are consistent with random alignments between the core-scale magnetic field, core orientation, and core velocity gradient, in agreement with the results by Pandhi et al. (2023) for the cloud-scale field. We conclude that there is a clear change in the magnetic field in the transition from cloud- to core-scales. Our results suggest that the magnetic field may not play a dominant role in the evolution of dense cores on core scales.