First Detection of the Zeeman Effect in the 36 GHz Class I methanol maser line with the EVLA

Abstract

We report the first detection of the Zeeman effect in the 36 GHz Class I methanol maser line. The observations were carried out with 13 antennas of the EVLA toward the high mass star forming region M8E. Based on our adopted Zeeman splitting factor of $z = 1.7 Hz/mG, we detect a line of sight magnetic field of -31.3 +/- 3.5 mG and 20.2 +/- 3.5 mG to the northwest and southeast of the maser line peak respectively. This change in sign over a 1300 AU size scale may indicate that the masers are tracing two regions with different fields, or that the same field curves across the regions where the masers are being excited. The detected fields are not significantly different from the magnetic fields detected in the 6.7 GHz Class II methanol maser line, indicating that methanol masers may trace the large scale magnetic field, or that the magnetic field remains unchanged during the early evolution of star forming regions. Given what is known about the densities at which 36 GHz methanol masers are excited, we find that the magnetic field is dynamically significant in the star forming region.

10 pages, accepted by ApJ Letters

References in corpus (3)

• A new probe of magnetic fields during high-mass star formation: Zeeman splitting of 6.7 GHz methanol masers
• Resolved 24.5 micron emission from massive young stellar objects
• Mid-infrared interferometry of massive young stellar objects. I. VLTI and Subaru observations of the enigmatic object M8E-IR

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• The Zeeman Effect in the 44 GHz Class I Methanol Maser Line toward DR21(OH)
• A Catalog of CH_3OH 7_0-6_1 A^+ Maser Sources in Massive Star-Forming Regions. II. Masers in NGC 6334F, G8.67-0.36, and M17
• Comparison of Two Epochs of the Zeeman Effect in the 44 GHz Class I methanol (CH3OH) maser line in OMC-2
• Stability of a self-gravitating homogeneous resistive plasma
• The effects of stellar feedback on molecular clumps in the Lagoon Nebula (M8)
• Polarization properties of methanol masers
• A Curious Case of Circular Polarization in the 25 GHz Methanol Maser Line toward OMC-1
• Masers in star forming regions
• Very Large Array Detection of the 36 GHz Zeeman Effect in DR21W Revisited