Other
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21541531b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #415.31; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.266
Other
Scientific paper
We investigate the nature of turbulence in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) using several diagnostics known to provide information on magnetohydrodynamic sonic and Alfven
Mach numbers. We calculated the 2nd, 3rd and 4th statistical moments of the SMC, i.e. variance, skewness and kurtosis, respectively. It
is known that a strong dependence of variance, skewness and kurtosis with Ms exists. An analysis of 3rd and 4th order moments give us a average Ms=3-4 for the SMC. We explore moments of smaller scale features in the SMC by making 'moment maps’ with a circular beam aperture. These maps indicate large turbulence in star forming regions and at regions on the interface of supershells. We also investigate how the spatial power spectral slope, which is known to get shallower with increasing sonic Mach number, of the SMC compares with that of simulations. We find that this method gives Ms 3 and suggests the SMC may be super-Alfvenic. We also calculate the sonic Mach number of the SMC using the ratio of kinetic to spin temperature, and obtain a median value for the cold gas of Ms = 7.12 ± 3.41. In addition to these techniques we apply the bispectrum, a new tool for statistical studies of the interstellar medium, in order to study turbulence wave-wave interactions. Unlike the ordinary power spectrum, the bispectrum preserves phase information in the stochastic field. We compare the bispectrum of the SMC with that of 3D isothermal simulations. We explore the bispectrum of the SMC for a variety of velocity channel samplings. We compare the bispectrum of the SMC to bispectrum of simulations of strong and weakly magnetized turbulence and find that the bispectrum of the SMC shows similar properties to supersonic
turbulence.
This work was in part supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
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