Related papers: Resolved shocks in clumpy media
Collisionless shocks, that is shocks mediated by electromagnetic processes, are customary in space physics and in astrophysics. They are to be found in a great variety of objects and environments: magnetospheric and heliospheric shocks,…
We study the statistics of density for supersonic turbulence in a medium with magnetic pressure larger than the gaseous pressure. This study is motivated by molecular cloud research. Our simulations exhibit clumpy density structures, which…
Many astrophysical flows occur in inhomogeneous media. The broad-line regions (BLR) of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are one of the important examples where emission-line clouds interact with the outflow. We present results of a numerical…
Outflows of young stars drive shocks into dusty, molecular regions. Most models of such shocks assume that they are steady and propagating perpendicular to the magnetic field. Real shocks often violate both of these assumptions and the…
We present an alternative explanation for the nature of turbulence in molecular clouds. Often associated with classical models of turbulence, we instead interpret the observed gas dynamics as random motions, induced when clumpy gas is…
We study the survival of substructures (clumps) within larger self-gravitating dark matter halos. Building on scaling relations obtained from N-body calculations of violent relaxation, we argue that the tidal field of galaxies and halos can…
The formation and evolution of nonlinear and turbulent dynamical structures in two-dimensional complex plasmas and fluids is explored by means of generalised (drift) fluid simulations. Recent numerical results on turbulence in dusty…
How does turbulence contribute to the formation and structure of the dense interstellar medium (ISM)? Molecular clouds are dense, high-pressure objects. It is usually argued that gravitational confinement causes the high pressures, and that…
We report three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of shocks (${\cal M_{\rm shock}}\geq 4$) interacting with fractal multicloud layers. The evolution of shock-multicloud systems consists of four stages: a shock-splitting phase in which…
An initially planar shock wave propagating into a medium of non-uniform density will be perturbed, leading to the generation of post-shock velocity perturbations. Using numerical simulations we study this phenomenon in the case of…
We present a design for high energy density laboratory experiments studying the interaction of hypersonic shocks with a large number of inhomogeneities. These ``clumpy'' flows are relevant to a wide variety of astrophysical environments…
Recent progress in the understanding of star formation is summarized. A consistent picture is emerging where molecular clouds form with turbulent velocity fields and clumpy substructure, imprinted already during their formation. The clouds…
We study the propagation of ultra-short pulses in a cubic nonlinear medium. Using multiple-scale technique, we derive a new wave equation that preserves the nonlocal dispersion present in Maxwell's equations. As a result, we are able to…
Astrophysical gases are commonly multiphase and highly turbulent. In this work, we investigate the survival and growth of cold gas in such a turbulent, multi-phase medium using three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations. Similar to…
We investigate the properties of highly compressible turbulence, the compressibility arising from a small effective polytropic exponent $\gamma_e$ due to cooling. In the limit of small $\gamma_e$, the density jump at shocks is shown to be…
Shocks are a ubiquitous consequence of cosmic structure formation, and they play an essential role in heating galaxy cluster media. Virtually all of the gas in clusters has been processed by one or more shocks of at least moderate strength.…
We analyze the main features of radiation-mediated shocks at arbitrary shock velocities, both non-relativistic and relativistic. We describe two mechanisms, which may lead to formation of a sharp viscous subshock within otherwise smooth…
The problem of collisionless shocks is posed as the problem of understanding how in a completely collisionless streaming high-temperature plasma shocks can develop at all, forming discontinuous transition layers of thickness much less than…
Solutions of constant-coefficient nonlinear hyperbolic PDEs generically develop shocks, even if the initial data is smooth. Solutions of hyperbolic PDEs with variable coefficients can behave very differently. We investigate formation and…
We develop a formalism for the identification and accurate estimation of the strength of structure formation shocks during cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. Shocks not only play a decisive role for the thermalization…