DISPERSION OF MAGNETIC FIELDS IN MOLECULAR CLOUDS. II.

By M. Houde, J. Vaillancourt, R. Hildebrand, S. Chitsazzadeh, L. Kirby. 2008

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We expand our study on the dispersion of polarization angles in molecular clouds. We show how the effect of signal integration through the thickness of the cloud as well as across the area subtended by the telescope beam inherent to dust continuum measurements can be incorporated in our analysis to correctly account for its effect on the measured angular dispersion and inferred turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio. We further show how to evaluate the turbulent magnetic field correlation scale from polarization data of sufficient spatial resolution and high enough spatial sampling rate. We apply our results to the molecular cloud OMC-1, where we find a turbulent correlation length of δ ≈ 16 mpc, a turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio of approximately 0.5, and a plane-of-the-sky large-scale magnetic field strength of approximately 760 μG.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a00fc0cd6b1da058e7b72bba8e6ee21dd2250354

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Citations in the corpus

CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, methodology): “Using these polarization maps we will measure the disorder in the magnetic field direction [457, 458, 459, 460], the degree of polarization [461], and determine whether there is alignment between the orientation of the magnetic field and cloud structure [462].”
AN IMPRINT OF MOLECULAR CLOUD MAGNETIZATION IN THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE DUST POLARIZED EMISSION (2013, background): “Theoretical modeling of CF shows that the magnetic field strength estimates are improved by separating the turbulent and uniform components of the magnetic field (Falceta-Gonçalves et al. 2008; Hildebrand et al. 2009).”
Planck intermediate results: XXXV. Probing the role of the magnetic field in the formation of structure in molecular clouds (2015, unknown): “The extended method, also implemented in Houde et al. (2011, 2013), is based on the identiﬁcation of the magnetized turbulence correlation length ( δ ) by means of the structure function of the polarization angles.”
Planck intermediate results. XIX. An overview of the polarized thermal emission from Galactic dust (2014, methodology): “In that sense, it is distinct from structure functions often used to describe polarization direction (see Serkowski 1958; Kobulnicky et al. 1994; Hildebrand et al. 2009) which do not depend on position.”