Chandrasekhar–Fermi method or CF method or Davis–Chandrasekhar–Fermi method is a method that is used to calculate the mean strength of the interstellar magnetic field that is projected on the plane of the sky. The method was described by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" an ...

in 1953 and independently by Leverett Davis Jr in 1951. According to this method, the magnetic field

B

in the plane of the sky is given by :

B = Q\sqrt \frac

where

\rho

is the mass density,

\delta v

is the line-of-sight velocity dispersion and

\delta \phi

is the dispersion of polarization angles and

Q

is an order unity factor, which is typically taken it to be

Q\approx 0.5

. The method is also employed for prestellar molecular clouds.Crutcher, R. M., Nutter, D. J., Ward-Thompson, D., & Kirk, J. M. (2004). SCUBA polarization measurements of the magnetic field strengths in the L183, L1544, and L43 prestellar cores. The Astrophysical Journal, 600(1), 279.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chandrasekhar-Fermi method Astrophysics