Instabilities and the adiabatic and isothermal blast wave models for supernova remnants

Abstract

Isenberg as well as Lerche and Vasyliunas proposed the existence of an instability to radial perturbations in adiabatic and isothermal models of self-similar supernova blast waves. Their derivations fail to impose the physical conservation laws at the shock (i.e., the Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions) as boundary conditions, and their claim of an instability is unsubstantiated. Although an analytic demonstration of the stability of the adiabatic self-similar solution does not presently exist, the cumulative result of three decades of gas dynamic experimentation and numerical simulation provides unmistakable evidence for the stability of self-similar blast waves.