| Description: | The effects of magnetic fields on high-mass star formation are still unclear. This is predominantly due to the lack of good observations and the difficulty of observational interpretation. In this talk, Wouter Vlemmings will present a number of projects that are currently attempting to shed light on this issue. Specifically, he will focus on methanol maser observations that have recently been shown to be excellent tracers of fairly large scale magnetic fields in some of the densest regions around massive protostars.
The picture shows the first 6.7 methanol maser polarisation map. The polarisation vectors indicate a magnetic field along the extended N-S maser structure.The methanol masers of W3(OH) (contours) including the polarisation vectors (black) scaled linearly according the fractional linear polarisation (PL). The blue triangles denote the main line OH masers from Wright et al. (2004b) for which polarised intensity was detected at 5sigma significance (polarised flux >7 mJy), and the red vectors are their linearly scaled polarisation vectors. The main line OH maser polarisation vectors lengths are scaled down by a factor of 5 with respect to the lengths of the methanol maser polarisation vectors (Vlemmings, Harvey-Smith & Cohen, 2006, MNRAS). |
