Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence at High-Latitude Regions of the Milky Way

Abstract

We performed statistical analysis on the high-latitude molecular cloud MBM16 with data collected from the Galactic Arecibo L-Band Feed Array HI (GALFA-HI) Survey. We developed a code to convolve a circular kernel across a spatial column density image to create maps of the 3rd and 4th statistical moments. With these higher-order moment maps, we utilized a relationship derived purely from the theoretical MHD simulations of Burkhart et al. (2010) to directly estimate the sonic Mach number (Ms). We then looked at an estimate for the slope of the spatial power of our region to check our range of calculated Mach numbers and verify the reliability of our results. We found that the translucent, non-star forming molecular cloud, MBM16, can be considered largely subsonic to transonic, which is consistent with the conception of stars being dominant drivers of interstellar turbulence.Â