Related papers: The Heliospheric Termination Shock
An overview is given on the present status of the understanding of the origin of galactic cosmic rays. Recent measurements of charged cosmic rays and photons are reviewed. Their impact on the contemporary knowledge about the sources and…
The existence and stability of a spherical transonic shock in a hemispherical shell under the three dimensional perturbations of the incoming flows and the exit pressure is established without any further restrictions on the background…
We demonstrate that cosmic rays form filamentary structures in the precursors of supernova remnant shocks due to their self-generated magnetic fields. The cosmic-ray filamentation results in the growth of a long wavelength instability, and…
The properties of cosmic shock waves are studied through numerical simulations in two cosmological scenarios (SCDM and LCDM). The scaling relations for the average radius and velocity associated with the accretion shocks are somewhat…
Nonthermal particles can be produced due to incomplete thermalization at collisionless shocks and further accelerated to very high energies via diffusive shock acceleration. In a previous study we explored the cosmic ray (CR) acceleration…
I review several ongoing connections between space physics and astrophysics: a) Measurements of energetic particle spectra have confirmed theoretical prediction of the highest energy to which shocks can accelerate particles, and this has…
The topic of cosmic strings provides a bridge between the physics of the very small and the very large. They are predicted by some unified theories of particle interactions. If they exist, they may help to explain some of the largest-scale…
The possibility that the Fermi scale is the only fundamental energy scale of Nature is under serious consideration at present, yet cosmic rays may already have provided direct evidence of new physics at a much higher scale. The recent…
Stasis is a unique cosmological phenomenon in which the abundances of different energy components in the universe (such as matter, radiation, and vacuum energy) each remain fixed even though they scale differently under cosmological…
Owing to the ever-present solar wind, our vast solar system is full of plasmas. The turbulent solar wind, together with sporadic solar eruptions, introduces various space plasma processes and phenomena in the solar atmosphere all the way to…
Super-elastic collision is an abnormal collisional process, in which some particular mechanisms cause the kinetic energy of the system increasing. Most studies in this aspect focus on solid-like objects, but they rarely consider gases or…
Collisionless shocks in plasmas play an important role in space physics (Earth's bow shock) and astrophysics (supernova remnants, relativistic jets, gamma-ray bursts, high energy cosmic rays). While the formation of a fluid shock through…
Galactic spiral shocks are dominant morphological features and believed to be responsible for substructure formation within spiral arms in disk galaxies. They can also contribute a substantial amount of kinetic energy to the interstellar…
The detection of high-energy particles, cosmic rays (CRs), deep inside the heliosphere implies that there are, at least, three distinctly different stages in the lifetime of a CR particle: acceleration, propagation in the interstellar…
We evaluate the current status of supernova remnants as the sources of Galactic cosmic rays. We summarize observations of supernova remnants, covering the whole electromagnetic spectrum and describe what these obser- vations tell us about…
Despite being studied for many years, the structure of collisionless shocks is still not fully determined. Such shocks are known to be accelerators of cosmic rays, which, in turn, modify the shock structure. The shock width $\lambda$ is…
When a magnetised, thermal plasma containing a shock wave efficiently accelerates Cosmic Rays (CR) a reaction is exerted on the fluid structure. The simplest description of this process involves three conservation equations for the…
Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in astrophysics and in the lab. Recent numerical simulations and experiments have shown how they can arise from the encounter of two collisionless plasma shells. When the shells interpenetrate, the…
The formation of massive stars play a crucial role in galaxies from numerous points of view. The protostar generates a strong ultraviolet radiation field that ionizes its surroundings, and it drives powerful shock waves in the neighbouring…
The filamentation instability triggered when two counter streaming plasma shells overlap appears to be the main mechanism by which collisionless shocks are generated. It has been known for long that a flow aligned magnetic field can…