Magnetic Ribbons: A Minimum Hypothesis Model for Filaments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a magnetic ribbon model for molecular cloud filaments, explaining their observed properties through magnetic and turbulent effects, differing from traditional Jeans length expectations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel magnetic ribbon model that accounts for filament formation and observed width-column density relations in molecular clouds.

Findings

Synthetic observations match the flat width-column density relation.

The model aligns with observed filament properties.

It challenges the traditional Jeans length explanation.

Abstract

We develop a magnetic ribbon model for molecular cloud filaments. These result from turbulent compression in a molecular cloud in which the background magnetic field sets a preferred direction. We use our model to calculate a synthetic observed relation between apparent width in projection versus observed column density. The relationship is relatively flat, in rough agreement with the observations, and unlike the simple expectation based on a Jeans length argument.