Estimation of Magnetic Field Strength in the Turbulent Warm Ionized Medium

Abstract

We studied Faraday rotation measure (RM) in turbulent media with the rms Mach number of unity, using isothermal, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence simulations. Four cases with different values of initial plasma beta were considered. Our main findings are as follows. (1) There is no strong correlation between the fluctuations of magnetic field strength and gas density. So the magnetic field strength estimated with RM/DM (DM is the dispersion measure) correctly represents the true mean strength of the magnetic field along the line of sight. (2) The frequency distribution of RMs is well fitted to the Gaussian. In addition, there is a good relation between the width of the distribution of RM/$\overline{\mathrm{RM}}$ ($\overline{\mathrm{RM}}$ is the average value of RMs) and the strength of the regular field along the line of sight; the width is narrower, if the field strength is stronger. We discussed the implications of our findings in the warm ionized medium where the Mach number of turbulent motions is around unity.

To appear in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Magnetism in the spiral galaxy NGC 6946: magnetic arms, depolarization rings, dynamo modes and helical fields
• The Turbulent Warm Ionized Medium: Emission Measure Distribution and MHD Simulations
• Density probability distribution functions of diffuse gas in the Milky Way

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