English

Dispersion of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds. I

Astrophysics 2011-02-11 v2

Abstract

We describe a method for determining the dispersion of magnetic field vectors about large-scale fields in turbulent molecular clouds. The method is designed to avoid inaccurate estimates of magnetohydrodynamic or turbulent dispersion - and help avoiding inaccurate estimates of field strengths - due to large-scale, non-turbulent field structure when using the well-known method of Chandrasekhar and Fermi. Our method also provides accurate, independent estimates of the turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio. We discuss applications to the molecular clouds OMC-1, M17, and DR21(Main).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0811.0813,
  title  = {Dispersion of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds. I},
  author = {Roger H. Hildebrand and Larry Kirby and Jessie L. Dotson and Martin Houde and John E. Vaillancourt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0811.0813},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

19 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in the ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:38:36.515Z