DISPERSION OF MAGNETIC FIELDS IN MOLECULAR CLOUDS. II.

Abstract

We expand our study on the dispersion of polarization angles in molecular\nclouds. We show how the effect of signal integration through the thickness of\nthe cloud as well as across the area subtended by the telescope beam inherent\nto dust continuum measurements can be incorporated in our analysis to correctly\naccount for its effect on the measured angular dispersion and inferred\nturbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio. We further show how to\nevaluate the turbulent magnetic field correlation scale from polarization data\nof sufficient spatial resolution and high enough spatial sampling rate. We\napply our results to the molecular cloud OMC-1, where we find a turbulent\ncorrelation length of approximately 16 mpc, a turbulent to large-scale magnetic\nfield strength ratio of approximately 0.5, and a plane-of-the-sky large-scale\nmagnetic field strength of approximately 0.76 mG.\n