The alignment of the polarization of herbig Ae/Be stars with the interstellar magnetic field

Abstract

We present a study of the correlation between the direction of the symmetry axis of the circumstellarmaterial around intermediate mass young stellar objects and that of the interstellar magnetic field.We use CCD polarimetric data on 100 Herbig Ae/Be stars. A large number of them show intrinsic polarization, which indicates that their circumstellar envelopes are not spherical. The interstellar magnetic field direction is estimated from the polarization of field stars. There is an alignment between the position angle of the Herbig Ae/Be star polarization and that of the field stars for themost polarized objects. This may be an evidence that the ambient interstellarmagnetic field plays a role in shaping the circumstellarmaterial around young stars of intermediatemass and/or in defining their angular momentum axis.