Velocity statistics from spectral line data: effects of density-velocity correlations, magnetic field, and shear

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  • 7 October 2002
Abstract
In a previous work Lazarian and Pogosyan suggested a technique to extract velocity and density statistics, of interstellar turbulence, by means of analysing statistics of spectral line data cubes. In this paper we test that technique, by studying the effect of correlation between velocity and density fields, providing a systematic analysis of the noise, and exploring the effect of a linear shear. We make use of both compressible MHD simulations and synthetic data to emulate spectroscopic observations. With such synthetic spectroscopic data, we studied anisotropies of the two point statistics and related those anisotropies with the magnetic field direction. This presents a new technique for magnetic field studies. The results show that the velocity and density spectral indices measured are consistent with the analytical predictions. We identified the dominant source of error with the limited number of data points along a given line of sight. We argue that in real observations the number of emmiting elements is essentially infinite and that source of noise vanishes.

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