The link between magnetic fields and filamentary clouds II: Bimodal linear mass distributions

Abstract

By comparing cumulative linear mass profiles of 12 Gould Belt molecular clouds within 500 pc, we study how the linear mass distributions of molecular clouds vary with the angles between the molecular cloud long axes and the directions of the local magnetic fields (cloud-field direction offsets). We find that molecular clouds with the long axes perpendicular to the magnetic field directions show more even distributions of the linear mass. The result supports that magnetic field orientations can affect the fragmentation of molecular clouds (Li et al. 2017).