Timothy Robishaw Quotes (6 Quotes)

What we see strongly suggests that the magnetic field is indeed helical. If it is so, then this tells us a lot about the role magnetic fields might play in molecular clouds and star formation. It would be a major piece of evidence in trying to solve this mystery of how stars form.

These results were incredibly exciting to me for a number of reasons. There's the scientific result of a helical field structure. Then, there's the successful measurement This type of observation is very difficult, and it took dozens of hours on the telescope just to understand how this enormous dish responds to the polarized radio waves that are the signature of a magnetic field.

It took hundreds of hours of telescope time before we were confident that we could do reliable science.

An analogy would be when you're scanning the radio dial and you get the same station separated by a small blank space. The size of the blank space is directly proportional to the strength of the magnetic field at the location in space where the station is being broadcast.

We wanted to make very high-resolution slices across the filament and see if the field really did reverse if it did, then it's very likely that the field is somehow tied up in the filament.

The process of star formation is obscured because it takes place in these dense molecular clouds, so it's not yet directly observable. Astrophysicists believe that magnetic fields play a strong role in regulating the star formation by affecting the shape of these molecular clouds.