Dispersion of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds. I

Creators: Hildebrand, Roger H.; Kirby, Larry; Dotson, Jessie L.; Houde, Martin; Vaillancourt, John E.

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 a large-scale, nonturbulent 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).

Additional Information

© 2009. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2008 November 5; accepted 2009 February 5; published 2009 April 16. We thank Shantanu Basu for helpful discussions. This work has been supported in part by NSF grants AST 05-05230, AST 02-41356, and AST 05-05124. L.K. acknowledges support from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Chicago. M.H.'s research is funded through the NSERC Discovery Grant, Canada Research Chair, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Ontario Innovation Trust, and Western's Academic Development Fund programs. J.E.V. acknowledges support from the CSO, which is funded through NSF AST 05- 40882.

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