Effects of Radiative Transfer on the Observed Anisotropy in Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulent Molecular Simulations

Abstract

We study the anisotropy of centroid and integrated intensity maps with synthetic observations. We perform postprocess radiative transfer including the optically thick regime that was not covered in Hernández-Padilla et al. We consider the emission in various CO molecular lines that range from optically thin to optically thick ( ^12 CO, ^13 CO, C ^18 O, and C ^17 O). The results for the velocity centroids are similar to those in the optically thin case. For instance, the anisotropy observed can be attributed to the Alfvén mode, which dominates over the slow and fast modes when the line of sight is at a high inclination with respect to the mean magnetic field. A few differences arise in the models with higher opacity, where some dependence on the sonic Mach number becomes evident. In contrast to the optically thin case, maps of integrated intensity become more anisotropic in optically thick lines. In this situation the scales probed are restricted, due to absorption, to smaller scales, which are known to be more anisotropic. We discuss how the sonic Mach number can affect the latter results, with highly supersonic cases exhibiting a lower degree of anisotropy.

Keywords

• Interstellar molecules
• Intercloud medium
• Interstellar magnetic fields
• Interstellar clouds
• Magnetohydrodynamics
• Radiative transfer