A method to analyse velocity structure

Abstract

We present a new method of analysing and quantifying velocity structure in star-forming regions suitable for the rapidly increasing quantity and quality of stellar position–velocity data. The method can be applied to data in any number of dimensions, does not require the centre or characteristic size (e.g. radius) of the region to be determined, and can be applied to regions with any underlying density and velocity structure. We test the method on a variety of example data sets and show it is robust with realistic observational uncertainties and selection effects. This method identifies velocity structures/scales in a region, and allows a direct comparison to be made between regions.