Related papers: The electron temperature distribution and the high…
Heating of charged particles via collisionless shocks, while ubiquitous in the universe, is an intriguing yet puzzling plasma phenomenon. One outstanding question is how electrons and ions approach an equilibrium after they were heated to…
Observations of SN1006 have shown that ions and electrons in the plasma behind fast supernova remnant shock waves are far from equilibrium, with the electron temperature much lower than the proton temperature and ion temperatures…
Upper limits on the shock speeds in supernova remnants can be combined with post-shock temperatures to obtain upper limits on the ratio of cosmic ray to gas pressure (P_CR / P_G) behind the shocks. We constrain shock speeds from proper…
Collisionless shocks are loosely defined as shocks where the transition between pre-and post-shock states happens on a length scale much shorter than the collisional mean free path. In the absence of collision to enforce thermal equilibrium…
Astrophysical shocks are often collisionless shocks. An open question about collisionless shocks is whether electrons and ions each establish their own post-shock temperature, or whether they quickly equilibrate in the shock region. Here we…
We investigate evolution of the intracluster medium (ICM), considering the relaxation process between the ions and electrons. According to the standard scenario of structure formation, ICM is heated by the shock in the accretion flow to the…
Seventy crossings of the Earths bow shock by the THEMIS satellites have been used to study thermal electron heating in collisionless, quasi-perpendicular shocks. It was found that the temperature increase of thermal electrons differed from…
In this Letter we use the unprecedented spatial resolution of the Chandra X-ray Observatory to carry out, for the first time, a measurement of the post-shock electron temperature and proper motion of a young SNR, specifically to address…
Spatial and spectral profiles of O VI emission behind a shock wave on the northern edge of the Cygnus Loop were obtained with the FUSE satellite. The velocity width of the narrowest O VI profile places a tight constraint on the electron-ion…
Observations of the oxygen lines [OII]3729 and [OIII]5007 in the medium immediately beyond the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant were carried out with the scanning Fabry-P\'erot spectrophotometer ESOP. Both lines were detected in three…
We present laboratory results on energy partitioning from supercritical, magnetized collisionless shock experiments ($\rm{M_A} \sim 8$, $\rm{M_{ms}}\sim 4$). We report the first observation of fully-developed laboratory shocks that evolve…
Astrophysical shocks at all scales, from those in the heliosphere up to the cosmological shock waves, are typically "collisionless", because the thickness of their jump region is much shorter than the collisional mean free path. Across…
We have obtained a contiguous set of long-slit spectra of a shock wave in the Cygnus Loop to investigate its structure, which is far from the morphology predicted by 1D models. Proper motions from Hubble Space Telescope images combined with…
We study the electron-proton temperature equilibration behind several shocks of the RCW 86 supernova remnant. To measure the proton temperature, we use published and new optical spectra, all from different locations on the remnant. For each…
A novel collisionless shock jump condition is suggested by modeling the entropy production at the shock transition region. We also calculate downstream developments of the atomic ionization balance and the ion temperature relaxation in…
Nonrelativistic electrostatic unmagnetized shocks are frequently observed in laboratory plasmas and they are likely to exist in astrophysical plasmas. Their maximum speed, expressed in units of the ion acoustic speed far upstream of the…
Weakly magnetized shock waves are paramount to a large diversity of environments, including supernova remnants, blazars, and binary-neutron-star mergers. Understanding the distribution of energy between electrons and ions within these…
We investigate the evolution of intracluster medium during a cluster merger, explicitly considering the relaxation process between the ions and electrons by N-body and hydrodynamical simulations. When two subclusters collide each other, a…
Radiative shock waves in the Cygnus Loop and other supernova remnants show different morphologies in [O III] and H{\alpha} emission. We use HST spectra and narrowband images to study the development of turbulence in the cooling region…
We use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to analyze interactions of the blast wave and the inhomogeneous interstellar medium on the western limb of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant. This field of view includes an initial interaction between…