2009/01/13 by A. Esquivel, A. Lazarian, Esquivel, A. +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0901.1899
To appear in proceedings of "Magnetic Fields in the Universe II"
arxiv created 2009/01/13 · openalex publication_date 2009/01/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We review the use of velocity centroids statistics to recover information of interstellar turbulence from observations. Velocity centroids have been used for a long time now to retrieve information about the scaling properties of the turbulent velocity field in the interstellar medium. We show that, while they are useful to study subsonic turbulence, they do not trace the statistics of velocity in supersonic turbulence, because they are highly influenced by fluctuations of density. We show also that for sub-Alfvénic turbulence (both supersonic and subsonic) two-point statistics (e.g. correlation functions or power-spectra) are anisotropic. This anisotropy can be used to determine the direction of the mean magnetic field projected in the plane of the sky.