Magnetic Ribbons: A Minimum Hypothesis Model for Filaments

Abstract

We develop a magnetic ribbon model for molecular cloud filaments. These result from turbulent compression in a molecular cloud in which the background magnetic field sets a preferred direction. We use our model to calculate a synthetic observed relation between apparent width in projection versus observed column density. The relationship is relatively flat, in rough agreement with the observations, and unlike the simple expectation based on a Jeans length argument.