STUDYING THE INTERSTELLAR MAGNETIC FIELD FROM ANISOTROPIES IN VELOCITY CHANNELS

Abstract

Turbulence in the interstellar medium is anisotropic due to the ubiquitous magnetic fields. This anisotropy depends on the strength of the magnetic field and leaves an imprint on observations of spectral line maps. We use a grid of ideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations of driven turbulence and produce synthetic position–position–velocity maps to study the turbulence anisotropy in velocity channels of various resolutions. We found that the average structure function of velocity channels is aligned with the projection of the magnetic field on the plane of the sky. We also found that the degree of such anisotropy increases with the magnitude of the magnetic field. For thick velocity channels (low velocity resolution), the anisotropy is dominated by density, and the degree of anisotropy in these maps allows one to distinguish sub-Alfvenic and super-Alfvenic turbulence regimes, but it also depends strongly on the sonic Mach number. For thin channels (high velocity resolution), we find that the anisotropy depends less on the sonic Mach number. An important limitation of this technique is that it only gives a lower limit on the magnetic field strength because the anisotropy is related only to the magnetic field component on the plane of the sky. It can, and should, be used in combination with other techniques to estimate the magnetic field, such as the Fermi-Chandrasekhar method, anisotropies in centroids, Faraday rotation measurements, or direct line-of-sight determinations of the field from Zeeman effect observations.