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Session 10 - Interstellar Medium and Star Formation.
Display session, Monday, June 08
Atlas Ballroom,
We have used the Infrared Space Observatory to performed far-infrared polarimetry of the thermal dust emission toward a filamentary dark cloud using the ISOPHOT instrument at a wavelength of 160 microns. Filamentary dark clouds, or globular filaments (GF), are nearby (100 - 400pc distance) molecular clouds containing small numbers of dense cloud cores connected by lower density gas and dust. These clouds look like strings (the low opacity material) with beads (the dense cores) strung along their lengths, often in a periodic fashion. These clouds may represent swept-up material, created by blast waves or strong stellar winds, or they may be a stable form of galactic molecular clouds. They most likely represent a transient phase of the molecular material, on its way from having resided in a larger cloud complex to in the future becoming a collection of Bok globules, or dispersing altogether. We are using ISO to test for the presence of embedded magnetic fields within the GF-9 filamentary cloud by performing polarization probes toward both a core region and a filamentary region (plus corresponding background or reference regions). The observations utilize the C200 2x2 pixel camera and take the form of small, overlapping raster maps wherein each central sky position is viewed by each of the C200 pixels to allow accurate removal of instrumental polarization.
