Formation of HI Clouds in Shock-compressed Interstellar Medium: Physical Origin of Angular Correlation Between Filamentary Structure and Magnetic Field

TL;DR

This study uses 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore how shock compression and turbulence in the interstellar medium lead to the formation of HI clouds aligned with magnetic fields, explaining observed filamentary structures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that turbulence and shock orientation influence the alignment of HI filaments with magnetic fields, providing a physical explanation for observed correlations.

Findings

HI clouds form via thermal instability driven by cooling.

Filament alignment depends on turbulence strength and shock angle.

Alignment shifts from perpendicular to parallel with magnetic field based on turbulence.

Abstract

Recent observations of neutral Galactic interstellar medium showed that filamentary structures of HI clouds are aligned with the interstellar magnetic field. Many interesting applications are proposed based on the alignment such as measurement of magnetic field strength through the Chandrasekhar-Fermi method and removal of polarized foreground dust emissions for the detection of inflationary polarized emission in the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, the physical origin of the alignment remains to be explained. To understand the alignment mechanism, we examine formation of HI clouds triggered by shock compression of diffuse warm neutral medium using three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations with the effects of optically thin cooling and heating. We show that the shock-compressed diffuse interstellar medium of density n~1 cm^-3 evolves into HI clouds with typical density n~50 cm^-3 via thermal instability driven by cooling, which is consistent with previous studies. We apply a machine vision transformation developed by Clark et al.(2014) to the resulting column density structures obtained by the simulations in order to measure angle correlation between filamentary structures of HI clouds and magnetic field. We find that the orientation of HI filaments depends on the environmental turbulent velocity field, particularly on the strength of shear strain in the direction of the magnetic field, which is controlled by the angle between the shock propagation direction and upstream magnetic field. When the strain along the magnetic field is weak, filamentary components of HI clouds basically lie perpendicular to the magnetic field. However, the filaments have come to align with the magnetic field, if we enhance the turbulent strain along the magnetic field or if we set turbulence in the preshock medium.