Probing the Turbulence Dissipation Range and Magnetic Field Strengths in Molecular Clouds
Astrophysics
2009-11-13 v1
Abstract
We study the turbulent velocity dispersion spectra of the coexistent HCN and HCO+ molecular species as a function of length scale in the M17 star-forming molecular cloud. We show that the observed downward shift of the ion's spectrum relative to that of the neutral is readily explained by the existence of an ambipolar diffusion range within which ion and neutral turbulent energies dissipate differently. We use these observations to evaluate this decoupling scale and show how to estimate the strength of the plane-of-the-sky component of the embedded magnetic field in a completely novel way.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0801.2757,
title = {Probing the Turbulence Dissipation Range and Magnetic Field Strengths in Molecular Clouds},
author = {Hua-bai Li and Martin Houde},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.2757},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
15 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal