Velocity statistics from spectral line data: effects of density–velocity correlations, magnetic field and shear

In a previous work, Lazarian and Pogosyan suggested a technique to extract velocity and density statistics, of interstellar turbulence, by means of analysing statistics of spectral line data cubes. In this paper, we test that technique by studying the effect of correlation between velocity and density fields, providing a systematic analysis of the uncertainties arising from the numerics, and exploring the effect of a linear shear. We make use of both compressible magnetohydrodynamics simulations and synthetic data to emulate spectroscopic observations and to test the technique. With the same synthetic spectroscopic data, we have also studied anisotropies of the two point statistics and related those anisotropies with the magnetic field direction. This presents a new technique for magnetic field studies. The results show that the velocity and density spectral indices measured are consistent with the analytical predictions. We have identified the dominant source of error with the limited number of data points along a given line of sight. We decrease this type of noise by increasing the number of points and by introducing Gaussian smoothing. We argue that in real observations the number of emitting elements is essentially infinite and that the source of noise vanishes.