Dispersion of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds. I

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to accurately measure magnetic field dispersion in turbulent molecular clouds, improving upon previous techniques by accounting for large-scale field structures.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method that isolates turbulent magnetic field dispersion from large-scale structures, enabling more precise magnetic field strength estimates in molecular clouds.

Findings

The method successfully distinguishes turbulent and large-scale magnetic field components.

Application to OMC-1, M17, and DR21 demonstrates improved accuracy.

Provides independent estimates of the turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio.

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 large-scale, non-turbulent 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).