Related papers: The saturation mechanism of thermal instability
(Abridged) We discuss the nonlinear development of the isobaric mode of thermal instability (TI) in the context of the atomic interstellar medium (ISM), in order to assess the ability of TI to establish a well-segregated multi-phase…
In weakly magnetized, dilute plasmas in which thermal conduction along magnetic field lines is important, the usual convective stability criterion is modified. Instead of depending on entropy gradients, instability occurs for small…
In dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction is primarily along magnetic field lines, and therefore highly anisotropic. As a result, the usual convective stability criterion is modified from a condition on entropy to a condition on…
Acceleration can change the ionization of X-ray irradiated gas to the point that the gas becomes thermally unstable. Cloud formation, the expected outcome of thermal instability (TI), will be suppressed in a dynamic flow, however, due to…
Thermal instability (TI) is a trigger mechanism, which can explain formation of condensations through some regions of the interstellar clouds. Our goal here is to investigate some conditions for occurrence of TI and formation of…
Nonlinear evolution of one-dimensional planar perturbations in an optically thin radiatively cooling medium in the long-wavelength limit is studied numerically. The accepted cooling function generates in thermal equilibrium a bistable…
A new statistical approach is presented to study the thermal instability process of optically thin unmagnetized plasma. In this approach the time evolution of mass distribution function over temperature is calculated. This function…
Thermally bistable fluid tends to self-organize into clouds of hot and cold material, which are internally uniform and separated by thin conduction fronts. The evolution of these clouds has been studied for isobaric systems, but when…
To model the temperature evolution of optically thin astrophysical environments at MHD scales, radiative and collisional cooling rates are typically either pre-tabulated or fit into a functional form and then input into MHD codes as a…
Thermal instability (TI) is a trigger mechanism, which can explain the formation of small condensations through some regions of the interstellar clouds. The instability criterion for flat geometry approximations has been investigated in…
Multiphase media have very complex structure and evolution. Accurate numerical simulations are necessary to make advances in our understanding of this rich physics. Because simulations can capture both the linear and nonlinear evolution of…
In many magnetized, dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction occurs almost exclusively parallel to magnetic field lines. In this case, the usual stability criterion for convective stability, the Schwarzschild criterion, which…
We study the effects of anisotropic thermal conduction on low-collisionality, astrophysical plasmas using two and three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations. For weak magnetic fields, dilute plasmas are buoyantly unstable for either…
Determining the origin of turbulence in galaxy clusters, and quantifying its transport of heat, is an outstanding problem, with implications for our understanding of their thermodynamic history and structure. As the dilute plasma of the…
We investigate numerically the role of thermal instability (TI) as a generator of density structures in the interstellar medium (ISM), both by itself and in the context of a globally turbulent medium. Simulations of the instability alone…
The thermal stability of rotating, stratified, unmagnetized atmospheres is studied by means of linear-perturbation analysis, finding stability, overstability or instability, depending on the properties of the gas distribution, but also on…
The intracluster medium (ICM) is stably stratified in the hydrodynamic sense with the entropy $s$ increasing outwards. However, thermal conduction along magnetic field lines fundamentally changes the stability of the ICM, leading to the…
In this work, we have carried out a two-dimensional (2D) simulation of thermal instability (TI) in interstellar matter (ISM), considering it to be a weakly ionised inviscid plasma with radiation loss. We carry out the simulation using our…
The Rossby wave instability, associated with density bumps in differentially rotating discs, may arise in several different astrophysical contexts, such as galactic or protoplanetary discs. While the linear phase of the instability has been…
We study the dynamics of phase transitions in the interstellar medium by means of three-dimensional hydrodynamic numerical simulations. We use a realistic cooling function and generic nonequilibrium initial conditions to follow the…