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We used a cosmological zoom-in simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy to study and quantify the topology of magnetic field lines around cold gas clouds in the circumgalactic medium (CGM). This simulation is a new addition to Project GIBLE, a suite of cosmological magnetohydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation with preferential super-Lagrangian refinement in the CGM, reaching an unprecedented CGM gas mass resolution of ∼225 M ⊙ . To maximize statistics and resolution, we focused on a sample of ∼200 clouds with masses of ∼10 6 M ⊙ . The topology of magnetic field lines around clouds is diverse, from threading to draping, and there is large variation in the magnetic curvature ( κ ) within cloud-background interfaces. We typically find little variation of κ between upstream and downstream cloud faces, implying that strongly draped configurations are rare. In addition, κ correlates strongly with multiple properties of the interface and the ambient background, including cloud overdensity and relative velocity, suggesting that cloud properties impact the topology of interface magnetic fields.
Ramesh et al. (Mon,) studied this question.