A high sampling-density polarization study of the Southern Coalsack

We present a densely sampled map of visual polarimetry of stars in the direction of the Southern Coalsack dark cloud. Our sample consists of new polarimetric observations of 225 stars drawn from the spectrophotometric survey of Seidensticker, and an additional 173 stars, covering the surrounding areas of the cloud, taken from the literature. Because all the target stars have at least spectroscopic parallaxes, we can reliably investigate the spatial origins of the polarization, in three dimensions. We decompose the polarization into three components, due to (i) the wall of the local hot bubble, (ii) the Coalsack cloud and (iii) material in the Carina spiral arm. The polarization due to the Coalsack varies, both in alignment efficiency  ( p / A_V )  and in the dispersion in polarization angle, across the cloud. Using a simplified radiative transfer treatment we show that the measured polarization in background gas is significantly affected by foreground polarization, and specifically that the analysis of the Coalsack polarization must take the effects of the local hot bubble wall into consideration. Correcting for this effect as well as for the internal line-of-sight averaging in the Coalsack, we find, based on a Chandrasekhar–Fermi analysis, a plane-of-the-sky magnetic field for the Coalsack cloud of  〈 B _⊥〉= 93 ± 23 μG  . A systematic error, best described by a multiplicative factor between 0.5 and 1.5, additionally arises from radiative transfer effect uncertainties. We propose that this high value for the magnetic field in the cloud envelope is due to the fact that the Coalsack cloud is embedded in the hot interior of the Upper Centaurus–Lupus superbubble.