pcafactory

The pcafactory is an analysis tool to extract velocity fluctuations in the interstellar medium (ISM). Studying these fluctuations has proven to be a robust approach to understanding the nature of non-thermal motions driven by turbulent and gravitational processes taking place in the ISM.

To do so, the package collects features from TurbuStat and Astrodendro to derive velocity structure functions by performing principal component analysis (PCA) on molecular line intensity cubes, which can be the product of observations or simulated data via radiative transfer. The PCA is carefully computed on selected regions of the input data as follows,

Then, the package conveniently shows the combined spatial and spectral scales, as well as the associated velocity structure functions, and stores this information in a database that can be used later for further analysis.

The tool was tailored to analyse the ISM velocity fluctuations but it may also be used on any other atomic/molecular association with kinematical observables.

Find tutorials in the examples folder.

Requirements

• turbustat
• astrodendro
• sf3dmodels (optional, for rad. transf.)

Installation

You need to clone this repository. If you have a github account run on Terminal:

git clone [email protected]:andizq/pcafactory.git

if you don't have one:

git clone https://github.com/andizq/pcafactory.git

For simplicity in future executions, create a variable with the path to the pcafactory/src folder in your ~/.bashrc file (~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile for Mac users). For example:

export PCAFACTORY="/Users/andizq/pcafactory/src"

Developers

• Andres Izquierdo
• Rowan Smith

Citing the pcafactory

The pcafactory is introduced in the Paper II of the Cloud Factory series. Please refer to that work if this package is useful for your research:

@ARTICLE{2021MNRAS.500.5268I,
       author = {{Izquierdo}, Andr{\'e}s F. and {Smith}, Rowan J. and {Glover}, Simon C.~O. and {Klessen}, Ralf S. and {Tre{\ss}}, Robin G. and {Sormani}, Mattia C. and {Clark}, Paul C. and {Duarte-Cabral}, Ana and {Zucker}, Catherine},
        title = "{The Cloud Factory II: gravoturbulent kinematics of resolved molecular clouds in a galactic potential}",
      journal = {\mnras},
     keywords = {gravitation, radiative transfer, turbulence, ISM: clouds, ISM: structure, Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies, Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics},
         year = 2021,
        month = jan,
       volume = {500},
       number = {4},
        pages = {5268-5296},
          doi = {10.1093/mnras/staa3470},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2011.02582},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.GA},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021MNRAS.500.5268I},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}