The Kinematic Structure of Magnetically Aligned HI Filaments

Abstract

We characterize the kinematic and magnetic properties of HI filaments located in a high Galactic latitude region ($165^\circ < \alpha < 195^\circ$ and $12^\circ < \delta < 24^\circ$). We extract three-dimensional filamentary structures using \texttt{fil3d} from the Galactic Arecibo L-Band Feed Array HI (GALFA-HI) survey 21-cm emission data. Our algorithm identifies coherent emission structures in neighboring velocity channels. Based on the mean velocity, we identify a population of local and intermediate velocity cloud (IVC) filaments. We find the orientations of the local (but not the IVC) HI filaments are aligned with the magnetic field orientations inferred from Planck 353 GHz polarized dust emission. We analyze position-velocity diagrams of the velocity-coherent filaments, and find that only 15 percent of filaments demonstrate significant major-axis velocity gradients with a median magnitude of 0.5 km s$^{-1}$ pc$^{-1}$, assuming a fiducial filament distance of 100 pc. We conclude that the typical diffuse HI filament does not exhibit a simple velocity gradient. The reported filament properties constrain future theoretical models of filament formation.