On the Fractal Structure of Molecular Clouds

Abstract

Molecular clouds show structure on all scales observed and many attempts have been made to characterize the structure which is linked to important aspects of star formation. Being generated predominantly by the turbulent internal cloud motion, the structure of molecular clouds is likely to be random to a large degree. As the information on the structural properties of random function is basically contained in its power spectrum, it is obviously important to study the power spectrum of observed cloud images. For HI clouds (Green 1993), the azimuthally averaged power spectra derived directly from interferometer observations are well characterized by a power law with a spectral index close to 2.8.