Evidence for dynamically important magnetic fields in molecular clouds

Recent observational evidence that magnetic fields are dynamically important in molecular clouds, compared to self-gravity and turbulence, is reviewed and illustrated with data from the NGC 2024 region. One piece of evidence, turbulence anisotropy, was found in the diffuse envelope of a cloud (A v ≈ 1; Heyer et al. 2008); our data further suggest turbulence anisotropy in the cloud (A v > 7) and even near the cloud core (A v ∼ 100). The data also show that magnetic fields can channel gravitational contraction even for a region with supercritical N(H 2 )/2B los ratio (the ratio between the observed column density and two times the line-of-sight observed field strength), a parameter which has been widely used by observers to estimate core mass-to-flux ratios. Although the mass-to-flux ratio is constant under the flux-freezing condition, we show that N(H 2 )/2B los grows with time if gravitational contraction is anisotropic due to magnetic fields.