SIMBAD references

One of the key problems in star formation research is to determine the role of magnetic fields. Starting from the atomic intercloud medium which has density n_H∼ 1/cm3, gas must accumulate from a volume several hundred pc across in order to form a typical molecular cloud. Star formation usually occurs in cloud cores, which have linear sizes below 1 pc and densities n _H2> 10⁵/cm3. With current technologies, it is hard to probe magnetic fields at scales lying between the accumulation length and the size of cloud cores, a range corresponds to many levels of turbulent eddy cascade, and many orders of magnitude of density amplification. For field directions detected from the two extremes, however, we show here that a significant correlation is found. Comparing this result with molecular cloud simulations, only the sub-Alfvénic cases result in field orientations consistent with our observations.