The Magnetic Field Structure of L1544: Mimir NIR and SOFIA HAWC+ FIR Polarimetry

The prestellar dark cloud L1544 in Taurus is a well-studied laboratory for characterizing the physical conditions present in a dense core just prior to the onset of active star formation, including temperature, density, kinematics, and chemistry. Here, the magnetic field is revealed throughout the region, from the low-density cloud periphery into the most optically opaque central 1,500 AU zone. Near-infrared background starlight polarimetry observations with the Mimir instrument reported in Clemens et al. (2016) have been augmented with new deeper Perkins/Mimir observations, now tracing extinctions up through about Av~30 mag in the near-infrared H and K bands. SOFIA HAWC+ Band D (154um) and Band E (214 um) observations of the polarized thermal dust emission complete that coverage by probing the highest extinctions that are present in the heart of this dense core. The magnetic field orientations revealed in the far-infrared agree surprisingly well with the limited central coverage provided by the millimeter dust emission polarimetry performed using SCUBA POL on the JCMT (Matthews et al. 2009). New NIKA/IRAM (Chacon-Tanarro et al. 2017) and AzTEC/LMT and MUSTANG-2/GBT (Chacon-Tanarro et al. 2019) millimeter wave photometric maps are combined with Herschel and SOFIA far-infrared photometric maps to help interpret the structure and strength of the magnetic fields traced with Mimir and SOFIA/HAWC+ in L1544. This work has been partially supported by NSF AST 18-14531 and USRA SOF-06-0012.