The structure and stability of shock waves in a multiphase interstellar medium. II - The effect of a magnetic field, thermal conduction, and viscosity

1975 ◽  
Vol 202 ◽  
pp. 372 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. L. Mufson
2017 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yukiharu Ohsawa

Comparisons are made of two different particle simulations: one for the study of plasma-based accelerators (Gueroult & Fisch, Phys. Plasmas, vol. 23, 2016, 032113) and the other for the study of shock formation in the interstellar medium (Yamauchi & Ohsawa, Phys. Plasmas, vol. 14, 2007, 053110). In the former, shock waves used for plasma density control create ion beams by reflection. In the latter, a fast and dense beam of exploding ions penetrates a surrounding plasma. In both simulations, magnetic bumps are generated from the motion of ion beams perpendicular to a magnetic field. Despite the apparent differences of their purposes, configurations and spatial scales, the two simulations show strong similarities in the generation processes and effects of the bumps, suggesting that these are not rare plasma phenomena. The bump created by the exploding ions develops into backward and forward magnetosonic pulses.


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. V. Coroniti

Within the hydromagnetic approximation, the effects of resistive, viscous, and thermal conduction dissipation on the structure of shock waves is studied. A Perturbation analysis about the upstream and downstream stationary points is developed, which, when coupled with the shock evolutionary conditions, determines the conditions for the formation of discontinuities in the shock structure. The Viscous subshock for fast shock waves and the hydromagnetic analogue of the gas dynamic isothermal discontinuity for fast and slow shocks are analyzed. Very oblique fast shocks require both resistive and viscous dissipation for a steady shock structure. Strong slow shocks propagationg nearly along the magnetic field fail to steepen if only resistive dissipation is included. The rotational discontinuity does not possess a stable shock structure for any of the dissipation processes considered.


2021 ◽  
Vol 502 (1) ◽  
pp. 1263-1278
Author(s):  
Richard Kooij ◽  
Asger Grønnow ◽  
Filippo Fraternali

ABSTRACT The large temperature difference between cold gas clouds around galaxies and the hot haloes that they are moving through suggests that thermal conduction could play an important role in the circumgalactic medium. However, thermal conduction in the presence of a magnetic field is highly anisotropic, being strongly suppressed in the direction perpendicular to the magnetic field lines. This is commonly modelled by using a simple prescription that assumes that thermal conduction is isotropic at a certain efficiency f < 1, but its precise value is largely unconstrained. We investigate the efficiency of thermal conduction by comparing the evolution of 3D hydrodynamical (HD) simulations of cold clouds moving through a hot medium, using artificially suppressed isotropic thermal conduction (with f), against 3D magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations with (true) anisotropic thermal conduction. Our main diagnostic is the time evolution of the amount of cold gas in conditions representative of the lower (close to the disc) circumgalactic medium of a Milky-Way-like galaxy. We find that in almost every HD and MHD run, the amount of cold gas increases with time, indicating that hot gas condensation is an important phenomenon that can contribute to gas accretion on to galaxies. For the most realistic orientations of the magnetic field with respect to the cloud motion we find that f is in the range 0.03–0.15. Thermal conduction is thus always highly suppressed, but its effect on the cloud evolution is generally not negligible.


2020 ◽  
Vol 496 (2) ◽  
pp. 2448-2461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Pais ◽  
Christoph Pfrommer ◽  
Kristian Ehlert ◽  
Maria Werhahn ◽  
Georg Winner

ABSTRACT Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) are believed to be accelerated at supernova remnant (SNR) shocks. In the hadronic scenario, the TeV gamma-ray emission from SNRs originates from decaying pions that are produced in collisions of the interstellar gas and CRs. Using CR-magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we show that magnetic obliquity-dependent shock acceleration is able to reproduce the observed TeV gamma-ray morphology of SNRs such as Vela Jr and SN1006 solely by varying the magnetic morphology. This implies that gamma-ray bright regions result from quasi-parallel shocks (i.e. when the shock propagates at a narrow angle to the upstream magnetic field), which are known to efficiently accelerate CR protons, and that gamma-ray dark regions point to quasi-perpendicular shock configurations. Comparison of the simulated gamma-ray morphology to observations allows us to constrain the magnetic coherence scale λB around Vela Jr and SN1006 to $\lambda _B \simeq 13_{-4.3}^{+13}$ pc and $\lambda _B \gt 200_{-40}^{+50}$ pc, respectively, where the ambient magnetic field of SN1006 is consistent with being largely homogeneous. We find consistent pure hadronic and mixed hadronic-leptonic models that both reproduce the multifrequency spectra from the radio to TeV gamma-rays and match the observed gamma-ray morphology. Finally, to capture the propagation of an SNR shock in a clumpy interstellar medium, we study the interaction of a shock with a dense cloud with numerical simulations and analytics. We construct an analytical gamma-ray model for a core collapse SNR propagating through a structured interstellar medium, and show that the gamma-ray luminosity is only biased by 30 per cent for realistic parameters.


2021 ◽  
Vol 917 (2) ◽  
pp. L20
Author(s):  
N. V. Pogorelov ◽  
F. Fraternale ◽  
T. K. Kim ◽  
L. F. Burlaga ◽  
D. A. Gurnett

1994 ◽  
Vol 142 ◽  
pp. 797-806
Author(s):  
Jonathan Arons ◽  
Marco Tavani

AbstractWe discuss recent research on the structure and particle acceleration properties of relativistic shock waves in which the magnetic field is transverse to the flow direction in the upstream medium, and whose composition is either pure electrons and positrons or primarily electrons and positrons with an admixture of heavy ions. Particle-in-cell simulation techniques as well as analytic theory have been used to show that such shocks in pure pair plasmas are fully thermalized—the downstream particle spectra are relativistic Maxwellians at the temperature expected from the jump conditions. On the other hand, shocks containing heavy ions which are a minority constituent by number but which carry most of the energy density in the upstream medium do put ~20% of the flow energy into a nonthermal population of pairs downstream, whose distribution in energy space is N(E) ∝ E−2, where N(E)dE is the number of particles with energy between E and E + dE.The mechanism of thermalization and particle acceleration is found to be synchrotron maser activity in the shock front, stimulated by the quasi-coherent gyration of the whole particle population as the plasma flowing into the shock reflects from the magnetic field in the shock front. The synchrotron maser modes radiated by the heavy ions are absorbed by the pairs at their (relativistic) cyclotron frequencies, allowing the maximum energy achievable by the pairs to be γ±m±c2 = mic2γ1/Zi, where γ1 is the Lorentz factor of the upstream flow and Zi, is the atomic number of the ions. The shock’s spatial structure is shown to contain a series of “overshoots” in the magnetic field, regions where the gyrating heavy ions compress the magnetic field to levels in excess of the eventual downstream value.This shock model is applied to an interpretation of the structure of the inner regions of the Crab Nebula, in particular to the “wisps,” surface brightness enhancements near the pulsar. We argue that these surface brightness enhancements are the regions of magnetic overshoot, which appear brighter because the small Larmor radius pairs are compressed and radiate more efficiently in the regions of more intense magnetic field. This interpretation suggests that the structure of the shock terminating the pulsar’s wind in the Crab Nebula is spatially resolved, and allows one to measure γ1, and a number of other properties of the pulsar’s wind. We also discuss applications of the shock theory to the termination shocks of the winds from rotation-powered pulsars embedded in compact binaries. We show that this model adequately accounts for (and indeed predicted) the recently discovered X-ray flux from PSR 1957+20, and we discuss several other applications to other examples of these systems.Subject headings: acceleration of particles — ISM: individual (Crab Nebula) — relativity — shock waves


1976 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 353-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. R. Priest ◽  
A. M. Soward

The first model for ‘fast’ magnetic field reconnection at speeds comparable with the Alfvén speed was put forward by Petschek (1964). It involves one shock wave in each quadrant radiating from a central diffusion region and leads to a maximum reconnection rate dependent on the electrical conductivity but typically of order 10-1 or 10-2 of the Alfvén speed. Sonnerup (1970) and Yeh and Axford (1970) then looked for similarity solutions of the magnetohydrodynamic equations, valid at large distances from the diffusion region; by contrast with Petschek's analysis, their models have two waves in each quadrant and produce no sub-Alfvénic limit on the reconnection rate.Our approach has been, like Yeh and Axford, to look for solutions valid far from the diffusion region, but we allow only one wave in each quadrant, since the second is externally generated and so unphysical for astrophysical applications. The result is a model which qualitatively supports Petschek's picture; in fact it can be regarded as putting Petschek's model on a firm mathematical basis. The differences are that the shock waves are curved rather than straight and the maximum reconnection rate is typically a half of what Petschek gave. The paper is a summary of a much larger one (Soward and Priest, 1976).


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