Abstract
Ensembles of line profiles of molecular clouds are presented, and it is shown that most of the profiles can be fitted by a strong and narrow Gaussian plus a weak and broad Gaussian. The remarkably self-similar scaling of the wing widths to that of the cores is shown and the available information on the density and velocity structure of the fast gas is discussed. It is shown that the line wings can be used as tracers of the probability distribution of the projected velocity field within the cloud volume sampled by the profile. The statistical properties of this distribution are compared with that of the velocity in atmospheric turbulence and recent duct flow measurements. 62 refs.
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