A signature of the intermittency of interstellar turbulence - The wings of molecular line profiles
E. Falgarone, T. G. Phillips;
ApJ, 1990, 359, 344
ABSTRACT:Ensembles of line profiles of molecular clouds are presented, and it is shown that most of the profiles can be fitted by a
strong and narrow Gaussian plus a weak and broad Gaussian.
The remarkably
self-similar scaling of the wing widths to that of the cores is shown and the available
information on the density and velocity structure of the fast gas is discussed.
It
is shown that the line wings can be used as tracers of the probability
distribution of the projected velocity field within the cloud volume sampled by the
profile.
The statistical properties of this distribution are compared with that of
the velocity in atmospheric turbulence and recent duct flow
measurements.
KEYWORDS: interstellar matter, line spectra, molecular clouds, turbulence, density distribution, intermittency, molecular spectra, signal to noise ratios, spatial distribution, spectral line width, velocity distribution
PERSOKEY:turbulence, ,
CODE: falgarone90