MHD Turbulence in ISM and ICM

Abstract

Observations indicate that turbulence in molecular clouds of the interstellar medium (ISM) is highly supersonic (M >> 1) and strongly magnetized ( ≈ ), while in the intracluster medium (ICM) it is subsonic (M <~1) and weakly magnetized ( ≈ ). Here, M is the turbulent Mach number and  is the ratio of the gas to magnetic pressures. Although magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in such environments has been previously studied through numerical simulations, some of its properties as well as its consequences are not yet fully described. In this talk, we report a study of MHD turbulence in molecular clouds and the ICM using a newly developed code based the high-order accurate, WENO (Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory) scheme. The simulation results using the WENO code are generally in agreement with those presented in the previous studies with, for instance, a TVD code (Porter et al. 2015 &, Park & Ryu 2019), but reveal more detailed structures on small scales. We here present and compare the properties of simulated turbulences with WENO and TVD codes, such as the spatial distribution of density, the density robability distribution functions, and the power spectra of kinetic and magnetic energies. We also describe the populations of MHD shocks and the energy dissipation at the shocks. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study on star formation processes in the ISM and shock dissipation in the ICM.