Distortion of Magnetic Fields in a Starless Core III: Polarization--Extinction Relationship in FeSt 1-457

Abstract

The relationship between dust polarization and extinction was determined for the cold dense starless molecular cloud core FeSt 1-457 based on the background star polarimetry of dichroic extinction at near-infrared wavelengths. Owing to the known (three-dimensional) magnetic field structure, the observed polarizations from the core were corrected by considering (a) the subtraction of the ambient polarization component, (b) the depolarization effect of inclined distorted magnetic fields, and (c) the magnetic inclination angle of the core. After these corrections, a linear relationship between polarization and extinction was obtained for the core in the range up to $A_V\approx 20$ mag. The initial polarization vs. extinction diagram changed dramatically after the corrections of (a) to (c), with the correlation coefficient being refined from 0.71 to 0.79. These corrections should affect the theoretical interpretation of the observational data. The slope of the finally obtained polarization--extinction relationship is $P_H/E_{H-K_s}=11.00\pm 0.72$ $\%$ ${\mathrm{mag}}^{-1}$, which is close to the statistically estimated upper limit of the interstellar polarization efficiency (Jones 1989). This consistency suggests that the upper limit of interstellar polarization efficiency might be determined by the observational viewing angle toward polarized astronomical objects.

Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ)

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Dust spectrum and polarisation at 850 um in the massive IRDC G035.39-00.33
• A systematic study of radiative torque grain alignment in the diffuse interstellar medium
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in a Starless Core IV: Magnetic Field Scaling on Density and Mass-to-flux Ratio Distribution in FeSt 1-457
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in Barnard 335
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in a Starless Core VI: Application of Flux Freezing Model and Core Formation of FeSt 1-457
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in BHR 71
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in a Starless Core V: Near-infrared and Submillimeter Polarization in FeSt 1-457
• Synthetic observations of dust emission and polarisation of Galactic cold clumps
• Birth of magnetized low-mass protostars and circumstellar disks
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in the Dense Core CB81 (L1774, Pipe 42) in the Pipe Nebula
• Distortion of Magnetic Fields in the Dense Core SL42 (CrA-E) in the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud Complex
• Hourglass Magnetic Field from a Survey of Current Density Profiles