Timothy Robishaw
Timothy Robishaw
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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.
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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.
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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.