Two-component Magnetic Field along the Line of Sight to the Perseus Molecular Cloud: Contribution of the Foreground Taurus Molecular Cloud
arXiv:2104.11932 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abfcc5
Abstract
Optical stellar polarimetry in the Perseus molecular cloud direction is known to show a fully mixed bi-modal distribution of position angles across the cloud (Goodman et al. 1990). We study the Gaia trigonometric distances to each of these stars and reveal that the two components in position angles trace two different dust clouds along the line of sight. One component, which shows a polarization angle of -37.6 deg +/- 35.2 deg and a higher polarization fraction of 2.0 +/- 1.7%, primarily traces the Perseus molecular cloud at a distance of 300 pc. The other component, which shows a polarization angle of +66.8 deg +/- 19.1 deg and a lower polarization fraction of 0.8 +/- 0.6%, traces a foreground cloud at a distance of 150 pc. The foreground cloud is faint, with a maximum visual extinction of < 1 mag. We identify that foreground cloud as the outer edge of the Taurus molecular cloud. Between the Perseus and Taurus molecular clouds, we identify a lower-density ellipsoidal dust cavity with a size of 100 -- 160 pc. This dust cavity locates at l = 170 deg, b = -20 deg, and d = 240 pc, which corresponds to an HI shell generally associated with the Per OB2 association. The two-component polarization signature observed toward the Perseus molecular cloud can therefore be explained by a combination of the plane-of-sky orientations of the magnetic field both at the front and at the back of this dust cavity.
arXiv commentAccepted for publication in ApJ
References in corpus (61)
- Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
- Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
- The Gaia mission
- The SIMBAD astronomical database
- Gaia Data Release 2: The astrometric solution
- Estimating distances from parallaxes IV: Distances to 1.33 billion stars in Gaia Data Release 2
- Planck 2013 results. XI. All-sky model of thermal dust emission
- On the Star Formation Rates in Molecular Clouds
- The Relation Between Optical Extinction and Hydrogen Column Density in the Galaxy
- Gaia Data Release 2: Catalogue validation
- A New Model of the Galactic Magnetic Field
- Estimating distances from parallaxes
- The Star Formation Rate and Gas Surface Density Relation in the Milky Way: Implications for Extragalactic Studies
- The Optical to Mid-Infrared Extinction Law Based on the APOGEE, Gaia DR2, Pan-STARRS1, SDSS, APASS, 2MASS and WISE Surveys
- Planck intermediate results. XXXV. Probing the role of the magnetic field in the formation of structure in molecular clouds
- Planck intermediate results. XIX. An overview of the polarized thermal emission from Galactic dust
- Tracing Magnetic Fields with Aligned Grains
- Gaia Data Release 1: Catalogue validation
- Gaia-2MASS 3D maps of Galactic interstellar dust within 3 kpc
- Radiative Torques on Interstellar Grains: I. Superthermal Spinup
- Star Formation Rates in Molecular Clouds and the Nature of the Extragalactic Scaling Relations
- The COMPLETE Survey of Star-Forming Regions: Phase I Data
- Radiative Torques on Interstellar Grains: II. Grain Alignment
- A Large Catalog of Accurate Distances to Local Molecular Clouds: The Gaia DR2 Edition
- Star Formation Relations in Nearby Molecular Clouds
- The Large and Small Scale Structures of Dust in the Star-Forming Perseus Molecular Cloud
- Planck 2018 results. XII. Galactic astrophysics using polarized dust emission
- An Extinction Threshold for Protostellar Cores in Ophiuchus
- A census of dense cores in the Aquila cloud complex: SPIRE/PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt survey
- Radiative torque alignment: Essential Physical Processes
- The Gould's Belt Distances Survey (GOBELINS). V. Distances and Kinematics of the Perseus molecular cloud
- Resolving nearby dust clouds
- A census of dense cores in the Taurus L1495 cloud from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey
- Mapping Distances Across the Perseus Molecular Cloud Using CO Observations, Stellar Photometry, and Gaia DR2 Parallax Measurements
- Planck intermediate results. XXI. Comparison of polarized thermal emission from Galactic dust at 353 GHz with interstellar polarization in the visible
- Magnetic Fields in Star-Forming Molecular Clouds. V. Submillimeter Polarization of the Barnard 1 Dark Cloud
- Using Herschel and Planck observations to delineate the role of magnetic fields in molecular cloud structure
- Probing accretion of ambient cloud material into the Taurus B211/B213 filament
- Herschel-Planck dust optical depth and column density maps - II. Perseus
- Star-forming content of the giant molecular filaments in the Milky Way
- ALMA imaging of the nascent planetary nebula IRAS 15103-5754
- The magnetic field structure in molecular cloud filaments
- Charting nearby dust clouds using Gaia data only
- The JCMT BISTRO Survey: The Magnetic Field of the Barnard 1 Star-Forming Region
- Helical Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds? A New Method to Determine the Line-of-Sight Magnetic Field Structure in Molecular Clouds
- The JCMT BISTRO Survey: Magnetic Fields Associated with a Network of Filaments in NGC 1333
- A 3D view of the Taurus star-forming region by Gaia and Herschel: multiple populations related to the filamentary molecular cloud
- Magnetic field morphology in nearby molecular clouds as revealed by starlight and submillimetre polarization
- Star-Gas Surface Density Correlations in Twelve Nearby Molecular Clouds I: Data Collection and Star-Sampled Analysis
- Physical properties of the ambient medium and of dense cores in the Perseus star-forming region derived from Herschel Gould Belt Survey observations
- Magnetic Properties of Dust Grains, Effect of Precession and Radiative Torque Alignment
- The COMPLETE Nature of the Warm Dust Ring in Perseus
- Gaia-DR2 extended kinematical maps. Part I: Method and application
- Demonstration of magnetic field tomography with starlight polarization towards a diffuse sightline of the ISM
- Extreme Starlight Polarization in a Region with Highly Polarized Dust Emission
- Herschel Gould Belt Survey Observations of Dense Cores in the Cepheus Flare Clouds
- Molecular cloud distances based on the MWISP CO survey and Gaia DR2
- Far-ultraviolet Observations of the Taurus-Perseus-Auriga Complex
- Infrared and optical polarimetry around the low-mass star-forming region NGC 1333 IRAS 4A
- Distance scale for high-luminosity stars in OB associations and in field with Gaia DR2. Spurious systematic motions
- Bow Magnetic Morphology Surrounding Filamentary Molecular Clouds? 3D Magnetic Field Structure of Orion-A
Cited by in corpus (10)
- 3D magnetic field morphology of the Perseus molecular cloud
- Starlight-polarization-based tomography of the magnetized interstellar medium: PASIPHAE's line-of-sight inversion method
- The cosmic DANCe of Perseus I: Membership, phase-space structure, mass, and energy distributions
- Three-dimensional magnetic fields of molecular clouds
- The magnetic field of the Radcliffe Wave: starlight polarization at nearest approach to the Sun
- Linear polarization study of open clusters towards the anticenter direction: Signature of the spiral arms
- Non-parametric Bayesian reconstruction of Galactic magnetic fields using Information Field Theory: The inclusion of line-of-sight information in ultra-high energy cosmic ray backtracking
- A three-dimensional reconstruction of the interstellar magnetic field toward a star-forming region
- TRIShUL: Technique for Reconstructing magnetic Interstellar Structure Using starLight polarization
- Are Stellar Embryos in Perseus Radio-Synchrotron Emitters? Statistical data analysis with Herschel and LOFAR paving the way for the SKA