Thermal Instability in a Cooling and Expanding Medium Including Self-Gravity and Conduction

Details Thermal Instability in a Cooling and Expanding Medium Including Self-Gravity and Conduction Thermal Instability in a Cooling and Expanding Medium Including Self-Gravity and Conduction

2002-01-10

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0201150v1

2002, The Astrophysical Journal, 569: 766-779

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

36 pages, 6 figures, accepted by ApJ, probable publication date: April 20, 2002

Scientific paper

10.1086/339396

A systematic study of the linear thermal stability of a medium subject to cooling, self-gravity and thermal conduction is carried out for the case when the unperturbed state is subject to global cooling and expansion. A general, recursive WKB solution for the perturbation problem is obtained which can be applied to a large variety of situations in which there is a separation of time-scales for the different physical processes. Solutions are explicitly given and discussed for the case when sound propagation and/or self-gravity are the fastest processes, with cooling, expansion and thermal conduction operating on slower time-scales. A brief discussion is also added for the solutions in the cases in which cooling or conduction operate on the fastest time-scale. The general WKB solution obtained in this paper permits solving the problem of the effect of thermal conduction and self-gravity on the thermal stability of a globally cooling and expanding medium. As a result of the analysis, the critical wavelength (often called Field length) above which cooling makes the perturbations unstable against the action of thermal conduction is generalized to the case of an unperturbed background with net cooling. As an astrophysical application, the generalized Field length is calculated for a hot (10^4 - 10^8 K), optically thin medium (as pertains, for instance, for the hot interstellar medium of SNRs or superbubbles) using a realistic cooling function and including a weak magnetic field. The stability domains are compared with the predictions made on the basis of models for which the background is in thermal equilibrium. The instability domain of the sound waves, in particular, is seen to be much larger in the case with net global cooling.

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