The physical and the geometrical properties of simulated cold HI structures

TL;DR

This study investigates the physical and morphological properties of cold HI structures formed by thermal instability in magnetized interstellar medium simulations, revealing magnetic influence on clump shape and alignment.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of simulated cold HI clumps, highlighting how magnetic fields affect their morphology and alignment, with results comparable to observations.

Findings

Magnetic fields increase filamentary and aspherical clump formation.

Clump magnetic alignment shifts from parallel to perpendicular with increasing field strength.

Clump properties match observed density and pressure ranges.

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to help shedding some light on the nature and the properties of the cold structures formed via thermal instability in the magnetized atomic interstellar medium. To this end, we searched for clumps formed in forced (magneto)hydrodynamic simulations with an initial magnetic field ranging from 0 to 8.3$\mu$G. We statistically analyzed, through the use of Kernel Density Estimations, the physical and the morphological properties of a sample containing $\sim 1500$ clumps, as well as the relative alignments between the main direction of clumps and the internal velocity and magnetic field. The density ($n\sim 50-200$cm$^{-3}$), the thermal pressure ($P_{th}/k\sim 4.9\times 10^3-10^4$K cm$^{-3}$), the mean magnetic field ($\sim 3-11$$\mu$G ), and the sonic Mach number of the selected clumps have values comparable to those reported in observations. We find, however, that the cloud sample can not be described by a single regime concerning their pressure balance and their Alf\'enic Mach number. We measured the morphological properties of clumps mainly through the asphericity and the prolatness, which appear to be more sensitive than the aspect ratios. From this analysis we find that the presence of magnetic field, even if it is weak, does qualitatively affect the morphology of the clumps by increasing the probability of having highly aspherical and highly plolate clumps by a factor of two, that is by producing more filamentary clumps. Finally, we find that the angle between the main direction of the clumps and the local magnetic field lies between $\sim\pi/4-\pi/2$ and shifts to more perpendicular alignments as the intensity of this field increases, while the relative direction between the local density structure and the local magnetic field transits from parallel to perpendicular.