Filaments and striations: anisotropies in observed, supersonic, highly-magnetised turbulent clouds

Beattie, J. R., Federrath, C., 2020, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 492, 668  [ Publication link ]  [ PDF ]

Abstract

Stars form in highly-magnetised, supersonic turbulent molecular clouds. Many of the tools and models that we use to carry out star formation studies rely upon the assumption of cloud isotropy. However, structures like high-density filaments in the presence of magnetic fields, and magneto-sonic striations introduce anisotropies into the cloud. In this study we use the two-dimensional (2D) power spectrum to perform a systematic analysis of the anisotropies in the column density for Alfven Mach number (Ma = 0.1-10) and turbulent Mach number (M = 2-20), with 20 high-resolution, three-dimensional (3D) turbulent magnetohydrodynamic simulations. We find that for cases with strong magnetic guide fields, corresponding to Ma < 1, and M <~ 4, the anisotropy in the column density is dominated by thin striations aligned with the magnetic field, while for M >~ 4 the anisotropy is significantly changed by high-density filaments that form perpendicular to the magnetic guide field. Indeed, the strength of the magnetic field controls the degree of anisotropy and whether not any anisotropy is present, but it is the turbulent motions that determine which kind of anisotropy dominates the morphology of a cloud.

The following movie shows 20 simulations of MHD turbulence with different sonic and Alfven Mach numbers. The magnetic guide field is pointing up on the page:

Acknowledgements

J. R. B. thanks Jonah Hansen for helpful editorial comments. C. F. acknowledges funding provided by the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP170100603, and Future Fellowship FT180100495), and the Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme (UA-DAAD). We further acknowledge high-performance computing resources provided by the Leibniz Rechenzentrum and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (grants pr32lo, pr48pi and GCS Large-scale project 10391), the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE grant pr89mu), the Australian National Computational Infrastructure (grant ek9), and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre with funding from the Australian Government and the Government of Western Australia, in the framework of the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme and the ANU Merit Allocation Scheme. The simulation software FLASH was in part developed by the DOE-supported Flash Centre for Computational Science at the University of Chicago.


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