Velocity Modification of Power Spectrum from Absorbing Medium

Abstract

Quantitative description of the statistics of intensity fluctuations within spectral line data cubes introduced in our earlier work is extended to the absorbing media. A possibility of extracting 3D velocity and density statistics from both integrated line intensity as well as from the individual channel maps is analyzed. We find that absorption enables the velocity effects to be seen even if the spectral line is integrated over frequencies. This regime that is frequently employed in observations is characterized by a non-trivial relation between the spectral index of velocities and the spectral index of intensity fluctuations. For instance when density is dominated by fluctuations at large scales, i.e. when correlations scale as r^{-\gamma}, \gamma<0, the intensity fluctuations exhibit a universal spectrum of fluctuations ~K^{-3} over a range of scales. When small scale fluctuations of density contain most of the energy, i.e. when correlations scale as r^{-\gamma}, \gamma>0, the resulting spectrum of the integrated lines depends on the scaling of the underlying density and scales as K^{-3+\gamma}. We show that if we take the spectral line slices that are sufficiently thin we recover our earlier results for thin slice data without absorption. As the result we extend the Velocity Channel Analysis (VCA) technique to optically thick lines enabling studies of turbulence in molecular clouds. In addition, the developed mathematical machinery enables a quantitative approach to solving other problems that involved statistical description of turbulence within emitting and absorbing gas.Comment: 51 page, 3 figures. Accepted to Astrophysical Journa