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Description
We report Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of polarized dust emission from the protostellar source Ser-emb 8 at a linear resolution of 140au. Assuming models of dust-grain alignment hold, the observed polarization pattern gives a projected view of the magnetic field structure in this source. Contrary to expectations based on models of strongly magnetized star formation, the magnetic field in Ser-emb 8 does not exhibit an hourglass morphology. Combining the new ALMA data with previous observational studies, we can connect magnetic field structure from protostellar core (~80000au) to disk (~100au) scales. We compare our observations with four magnetohydrodynamic gravo-turbulence simulations made with the AREPO code that have initial conditions ranging from super-Alfvenic (weakly magnetized) to sub-Alfvenic (strongly magnetized). These simulations achieve the spatial dynamic range necessary to resolve the collapse of protostars from the parsec scale of star-forming clouds down to the ~100au scale probed by ALMA. Only in the very strongly magnetized simulation do we see both the preservation of the field direction from cloud to disk scales and an hourglass-shaped field at <1000au scales. We conduct an analysis of the relative orientation of the magnetic field and the density structure in both the Ser-emb 8 ALMA observations and the synthetic observations of the four AREPO simulations. We conclude that the Ser-emb 8 data are most similar to the weakly magnetized simulations, which exhibit random alignment, in contrast to the strongly magnetized simulation, where the magnetic field plays a role in shaping the density structure in the source. In the weak-field case, it is turbulence-not the magnetic field-that shapes the material that forms the protostar, highlighting the dominant role that turbulence can play across many orders of magnitude in spatial scale.
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