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Tracing the hidden hand of magnetism in the galaxy
Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.
We know that the magnetic field is playing some sort of still unclear role in the evolution of the gas to form very dense, cold clumps of material called molecular clouds that are the birthplaces of the stars. One thing we’ve discovered in recent years is that as you move to denser structures in the interstellar medium, the filamentary molecular clouds actually prefer to orient orthogonally with respect to the local magnetic field. This is very tantalizing for the idea that the structure of the magnetic field might be important for where and how you sculpt these long filamentary knots of molecular material that are eventually the things that fragment and form stars.
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