Evidence for Dynamically Important Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds
Abstract
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 (Av~1; Heyer et al. 2008); our data further suggests turbulence anisotropy in the cloud (Av >7) and even near the cloud core (Av~100). The data also shows that magnetic fields can channel gravitational contraction even for a region with super-critical N(H2)/2Blos 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(H2)/2Blos grows with time if gravitational contraction is anisotropic due to magnetic fields.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1007.3312,
title = {Evidence for Dynamically Important Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds},
author = {Hua-bai Li and Raymond Blundell and Abigail Hedden and Jonathan Kawamura and Scott Paine and Edward Tong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.3312},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
accepted by MNRAS