Wherever we have the means of observing them, magnetic fields are detected across the full spectrum of astrophysical environments, from our own Earth, to stars, and cosmological structures. Magnetic fields are also present at all scales and evolutionary stages of star-forming structures. They have long been suspected to play a key role in shaping the typical outcome of the star formation process, such as stellar mass, spin, and multiplicity, or even the fate of stars towards their ultimate stages.
In this talk, I will provide a global outlook on the progresses made in the recent years to characterize the role of magnetic fields during the embedded phases of the star formation process.
Thanks to the development of observational capabilities and the parallel progress in numerical models capturing most of the important physics at work during star formation, the MagneticYSOs team successfully confronted detailed predictions of magnetized models to observational properties of the youngest protostars.
I will present the physical processes and observational methods allowing to trace the magnetic field in embedded protostars, and review the main steps, success and limitations in comparing real observations to synthetic observations from the non-ideal MHD models.
I will show how our work has shed light on the physical conditions required to ensure an efficient magnetic field coupling, and present unexpected results regarding the two main agents responsible for the coupling in star-forming cores: dust grains and ionized gas.
Following this Ariane thread, I will argue our observational and theoretical findings support a novel scenario where the angular momentum problem for star formation may be actually “solved” not by the formation of large protoplanetary disks but by the combination of 1) lack of organized rotation motions at large envelope radii, 2) the inefficient angular momentum transport due to magnetic braking in the inner envelope (and angular momentum removed through rotating outflows generated by the presence of the magnetic field), and 3) a local origin of the angular momentum incorporated in the star–disk system.
Reference review: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022FrASS...9.9223M/abstract
Organizer: Frédéric GALLIANO
