A synergy of the velocity gradients technique and the probability density functions for identifying gravitational collapse in self-absorbing media

Abstract

ABSTRACT The velocity gradients technique (VGT) and the probability density functions (PDFs) of mass density are tools to study turbulence, magnetic fields, and self-gravity in molecular clouds. However, self-absorption can significantly make the observed intensity different from the column density structures. In this work, we study the effects of self-absorption on the VGT and the intensity PDFs utilizing three synthetic emission lines of CO isotopologues 12CO (1–0), 13CO (1–0), and C18O (1–0). We confirm that the performance of VGT is insensitive to the radiative transfer effect. We numerically show the possibility of constructing 3D magnetic fields tomography through VGT. We find that the intensity PDFs change their shape from the pure lognormal to a distribution that exhibits a power-law tail depending on the optical depth for supersonic turbulence. We conclude the change of CO isotopologues’ intensity PDFs can be independent of self-gravity, which makes the intensity PDFs less reliable in identifying gravitational collapsing regions. We compute the intensity PDFs for a star-forming region NGC 1333 and find the change of intensity PDFs in observation agrees with our numerical results. The synergy of VGT and the column density PDFs confirms that the self-gravitating gas occupies a large volume in NGC 1333.