Abstract
The first polarization data from ALMA have been delivered, and are both expanding and confounding our understanding of the role of magnetic fields in low-mass star formation. Here I will show the highest resolution and highest sensitivity polarization images ever made of a Class 0 protostellar source. These new ALMA observations of the source, known as Ser-emb 8, achieve 140 AU resolution, allowing us to probe polarization -- and thus magnetic field orientation -- in the innermost regions surrounding the protostar. The collapse of strongly magnetized dense gas is predicted to pinch the magnetic field into an hourglass shape that persists down to scales <100 AU. However, in contrast with more than 50 years of theory, the ALMA data definitively rule out an hourglass morphology and instead reveal a chaotic magnetic field that has not been inherited from the field in the interstellar medium surrounding the source. We have simulated the star formation process with cutting-edge, moving-mesh AREPO simulations on scales from a million AU (5 pc) down to 60 AU. We find that only in the case of a very strong magnetic field (~100 microgauss on 5 pc scales) is the field direction preserved from cloud to disk scales. When the field is weak, turbulence in the interstellar gas shapes the field on large scales, and the forming star system re-shapes the field again on small scales, divorcing the field from its history on larger scales. We conclude that this is what has happened in Ser-emb 8. The main distinction from the strong-field star formation model is that in the weak-field case it is turbulence -- not the magnetic field -- that shapes the material that forms the protostar.