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K. M. Sandstrom, A. Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
The results of recent numerical MHD simulations of giant molecular clouds (Ostriker et al 2001, Padoan et al 2001) have shown that the method developed by Chandrasekhar and Fermi in 1953 may indeed give accurate measures of the magnetic field strength in molecular clouds. We have implemented this method to estimate magnetic field strengths in a number of clouds. The C-F estimates are compared with Zeeman data when available and the general applicability of the method is discussed. We find that the C-F method gives reasonable results. However, the method depends heavily on the value of the average density of the cloud and it is not clear how to best determine this quantity.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: ksandstr@fas.harvard.edu