2010/07/31 by Hua-bai Li, R. Blundell, Raymond Blundell +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astro and Planetary Science #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Computational physics #Flux (metallurgy) #Magnetic field #Mechanics #Molecular cloud #Optics #Physics #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Turbulence #astro-ph.GA #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17839.x
accepted by MNRAS
openalex publication_date 2010/11/22 · arxiv created 2010/11/24 · arxiv updated 2015/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Recent observational evidence that magnetic fields are dynamically important in molecular clouds, compared to self-gravity and turbulence, is reviewed and illustrated with data from the NGC 2024 region. One piece of evidence, turbulence anisotropy, was found in the diffuse envelope of a cloud (Avââ°Ë 1; Heyer et al. 2008); our data further suggest turbulence anisotropy in the cloud (Av > 7) and even near the cloud core (AvÃÅ 100). The data also show that magnetic fields can channel gravitational contraction even for a region with supercritical N(H2)/2Blos ratio (the ratio between the observed column density and two times the line-of-sight observed field strength), a parameter which has been widely used by observers to estimate core mass-to-flux ratios. Although the mass-to-flux ratio is constant under the flux-freezing condition, we show that N(H2)/2Blos grows with time if gravitational contraction is anisotropic due to magnetic fields.