Dispersion of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds. I

Abstract

We describe a method for determining the dispersion of magnetic field vectors about large-scale fields in turbulent molecular clouds. The method is designed to avoid inaccurate estimates of magnetohydrodynamic or turbulent dispersion - and help avoiding inaccurate estimates of field strengths - due to large-scale, non-turbulent field structure when using the well-known method of Chandrasekhar and Fermi. Our method also provides accurate, independent estimates of the turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio. We discuss applications to the molecular clouds OMC-1, M17, and DR21(Main).

19 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in the ApJ