Rayleigh-Taylor Instabilities in Young Supernova Remnants Undergoing Efficient Particle Acceleration

By J. Blondin, D. Ellison. 2001

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We employ hydrodynamic simulations to study the effects of high shock compression ratios, as expected for fast shocks with efficient particle acceleration, on the convective instability of driven waves in supernova remnants. We find that the instability itself does not depend significantly on the compression ratio, σ, with the growth rates and the width of the mixing region at saturation being comparable for the range of ratios we studied; 4 ≤ σ ≤ 21. However, because the width of the interaction region between the forward and reverse shocks can shrink significantly with increasing σ, we find that convective instabilities can reach all the way to the forward shock front if compression ratios are high enough. Thus, if supernova blast waves accelerate particles efficiently, we expect the forward shock to be perturbed with small-amplitude, small-wavelength bumps and to find clumps and filaments of dense ejecta material in the vicinity of the shock. In addition and in contrast to situations in which σ ≤ 4, any enhancement of the radial magnetic field from Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities will also extend all the way to the shock front, and this may help explain the slight dominance of radial fields long seen in polarization measurements of young remnants like Tycho.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc343dbb1bae94a69ff16ee3836f8686a7da1a7d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. N. Smith
2. J. Vink
3. A. Filippenko
4. D. Leonard
5. Thomas Matheson
6. A. Bykov
7. S. Blinnikov
8. C. Badenes

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. J. Vink
2. A. Bykov
3. N. Smith
4. C. Badenes
5. J. C. Raymond
6. Y. Ohira
7. R. Terrier
8. E. Helder

Citations in the corpus

• On the Determination of Ejecta Structure and Explosion Asymmetry from the X-Ray Knots of Cassiopeia A (2003, background): “Their apparent positions close to the blast wave may possibly be due to efficient particle acceleration and stronger resulting shock compression at the forward shock, as modelled by Blondin & Ellison (2001).”
• The Type IIn supernova 1994W: evidence for the explosive ejection of a circumstellar envelope (2004, background): “The growth and subsequent fragmentation of RT spikes in the dense CDS material results in the formation of a narrow layer (∆R/R ≈ 0.1− 0.15) composed of dense filaments, sheets and knots embedded in the rarefied hot gas behind the forward shock (Chevalier & Blondin 1995; Blondin & Ellison 2001).”
• Observational Signatures of Particle Acceleration in Supernova Remnants (2012, background): “52 4.1 Effect of CRs on Supernova Ejecta Morphology and Clumping Blondin and Ellison (2001) carried out hydrodynamical simulations on the evolution of supernova remnants, including the effects of particle acceleration.”
• Constraints on the Physics of Type Ia Supernovae from the X-Ray Spectrum of the Tycho Supernova Remnant (2005, background): “…the presence of clumps with a high-density contrast in the ejecta (Wang & Chevalier 2001), the effect of cosmic ray (CR) acceleration at the FS (Decourchelle et al. 2000; Blondin & Ellison 2001), and the interaction of Rayleigh-Taylor fingers with circumstellar cloudlets (Jun et al. 1996).”
• Cosmic-Ray Acceleration at the Forward Shock in Tycho’s Supernova Remnant: Evidence from Chandra X-Ray Observations (2005, background): “Cosmic ray acceleration at the BW would increase the compression factor there (above the usual value of 4) with a concomitant shrinking of the gap between the BW and CD (Decourchelle et al. 2000; Blondin & Ellison 2001).”