Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 399, Issue 4, Pages 1681-1693Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15420.x
Keywords
magnetic fields; methods: statistical; techniques: polarimetric; ISM: clouds
Categories
Funding
- NSF [AST 02-06216, AST02-39759, PHY-0114422, PHY-0551142, AST 05-40882, AST 0505124]
- NASA [NNG04G178G]
- Kavli Foundation
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We present a novel statistical analysis aimed at deriving the intrinsic shapes and magnetic field orientations of molecular clouds using dust emission and polarization observations by the Hertz polarimeter. Our observables are the aspect ratio of the projected plane-of-the-sky cloud image and the angle between the mean direction of the plane-of-the-sky component of the magnetic field and the short axis of the cloud image. To overcome projection effects due to the unknown orientation of the line-of-sight, we combine observations from 24 clouds, assuming that line-of-sight orientations are random and all are equally probable. Through a weighted least-squares analysis, we find that the best-fitting intrinsic cloud shape describing our sample is an oblate disc with only small degrees of triaxiality. The best-fitting intrinsic magnetic field orientation is close to the direction of the shortest cloud axis, with small (similar to 24 degrees) deviations towards the long/middle cloud axes. However, due to the small number of observed clouds, the power of our analysis to reject alternative configurations is limited.
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