Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT Collisional self-interactions occurring in protostellar jets give rise to strong shocks, the structure of which can be affected by radiative cooling within the flow. To study such colliding flows, we use the AstroBEAR AMR code to conduct hydrodynamic simulations in both one and three dimensions with a power-law cooling function. The characteristic length and time-scales for cooling are temperature dependent and thus may vary as shocked gas cools. When the cooling length decreases sufficiently and rapidly, the system becomes unstable to the radiative shock instability, which produces oscillations in the position of the shock front; these oscillations can be seen in both the one- and three-dimensional cases. Our simulations show no evidence of the density clumping characteristic of a thermal instability, even when the cooling function meets the expected criteria. In the three-dimensional case, the nonlinear thin shell instability (NTSI) is found to dominate when the cooling length is sufficiently small. When the flows are subjected to the radiative shock instability, oscillations in the size of the cooling region allow NTSI to occur at larger cooling lengths, though larger cooling lengths delay the onset of NTSI by increasing the oscillation period.
Institutions: University of Rochester, Imperial College London, Rice University
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: COLLIDING MAGNETIZED RADIATIVE PLASMAS: FRONTIER PLASMA DYNAMICS IN THE LAB AND ASTROPHYSICS, THE RADIATIVE MAGNETO-HYDRODYNAMICS OF COLLIDING FLOW: INSTABILITIES, RECONNECTION AND EXOPLANET ATMOSPHERE CONNECTIONS, G3965691718, G4110268185, STUDY OF PARTICLE ACCELERATION FROM MAGNETICALLY DRIVEN RECONNECTION IN DIFFERENT PLASMA REGIMES USING LASER-POWERED CAPACITOR COILS, G9000062059
OpenAlex ID: W3197329096