Bibcode
Levrier, F.; Neveu, J.; Falgarone, E.; Boulanger, F.; Bracco, A.; Ghosh, T.; Vansyngel, F.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 614, id.A124, 19 pp.
Advertised on:
6
2018
Journal
Citations
13
Refereed citations
11
Description
Context. The interstellar medium (ISM) is now widely acknowledged to
display features ascribable to magnetized turbulence. With the public
release of Planck data and the current balloon-borne and ground-based
experiments, the growing amount of data tracing the polarized thermal
emission from Galactic dust in the submillimetre provides choice
diagnostics to constrain the properties of this magnetized turbulence.
Aims: We aim to constrain these properties in a statistical way,
focussing in particular on the power spectral index βB
of the turbulent component of the interstellar magnetic field in a
diffuse molecular cloud, the Polaris Flare. Methods: We present
an analysis framework based on simulating polarized thermal dust
emission maps using model dust density (proportional to gas density
nH) and magnetic field cubes, integrated along the line of
sight (LOS), and comparing these statistically to actual data. The model
fields are derived from fractional Brownian motion (fBm) processes,
which allows a precise control of their one- and two-point statistics.
The parameters controlling the model are (1)-(2) the spectral indices of
the density and magnetic field cubes, (3)-(4) the RMS-to-mean ratios for
both fields, (5) the mean gas density, (6) the orientation of the mean
magnetic field in the plane of the sky (POS), (7) the dust temperature,
(8) the dust polarization fraction, and (9) the depth of the simulated
cubes. We explore the nine-dimensional parameter space through a Markov
chain Monte Carlo analysis, which yields best-fitting parameters and
associated uncertainties. Results: We find that the power
spectrum of the turbulent component of the magnetic field in the Polaris
Flare molecular cloud scales with wavenumber as
k-βB with a spectral index βB
= 2.8 ± 0.2. It complements a uniform field whose norm in the POS
is approximately twice the norm of the fluctuations of the turbulent
component, and whose position angle with respect to the north-south
direction is χ0 ≈-69°. The density field
nH is well represented by a log-normally distributed field
with a mean gas density ≈40 cm-3, a
fluctuation ratio σnH/≈1.6, and
a power spectrum with an index
βn=1.7-0.3+0.4. We also constrain
the depth of the cloud to be d ≈ 13 pc, and the polarization fraction
p0 ≈ 0.12. The agreement between the Planck data and the
simulated maps for these best-fitting parameters is quantified by a
χ2 value that is only slightly larger than unity.
Conclusions: We conclude that our fBm-based model is a reasonable
description of the diffuse, turbulent, magnetized ISM in the Polaris
Flare molecular cloud, and that our analysis framework is able to yield
quantitative estimates of the statistical properties of the dust density
and magnetic field in this cloud.