Velocity Centroids Anisotropy and the Signature of different MHD Modes in the Turbulent ISM (2008.05393v1)

Abstract: Magnetic turbulence is anisotropic as the directions of motion are constrained by the magnetic field. Such anisotropy can be observed in velocity centroids obtained from spectroscopic observations. We use magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations to produce synthetic spectroscopic observations (position-position-velocity data) and study the anisotropy in the structure function of velocity centroid maps. We decomposed the velocity in the simulations into Alfv\'en, slow and fast-modes and studied how each of them contribute to the observed anisotropy. We found that when the angle between the line of sight and the mean magnetic field is large the Alfv\'en-mode dominates the observed anisotropy, while for smaller angles the anisotropy is not large enough to be used to probe the magnetization of the media, and it is dominated by the slow-mode. Our results are in fair agreement with the theoretical predictions in Kandel et al.(2016,2017).