Energy transfer at colliding streams in the solar wind
Measuring energy transfer at colliding streams in solar wind based on data from Explorer 34 and Vela 4B satellites
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Measuring energy transfer at colliding streams in solar wind based on data from Explorer 34 and Vela 4B satellites
The pressure and deformation profiles between two colliding lubricated cylinders are obtained by solving the coupled, time-dependent elastohydrodynamic equations with an iterative procedure. The analysis includes effects which were not considered in a previous solution, namely, the effect of the lubricant compressibility and the effect of a lubricant with composite pressure-viscosity coefficients. It is found that the local approach velocity plays an important role during final stages of normal approach. It causes the lubricant to be entrapped within the contact region; neither the pressure nor the deformation profile converges to the Hertzian profile for a dry contact. The use of a smaller pressure-viscosity coefficient at high pressures reduces the sharp pressure gradient at the center of the contact and produces a much milder variation of load with respect to the film thickness. The effect of compressibility of the lubricant is found to be relatively small.
The instability of the electromagnetic linearly polarized mode propagating perpendicularly to the magnetic field is studied for a system composed of two colliding plasma streams, in each of which the electrons and ions are streaming at the same velocity. Using linearized Vlasov-Maxwell equations and allowing for anisotropic temperatures, it is found that in the presence of streaming ions the instability can occur in very low-beta plasmas. The plasma is increasingly susceptible to the electromagnetic instability with increasing values of beta, streaming velocity, temperature ratio of parallel to perpendicular electrons, and temperature ratio of perpendicular electrons to perpendicular ions.
Turbulent heating of colliding plasma streams has previously been observed in the solar wind. The original data were interpreted in terms of a fluid model. It is contended that a plasma-kinetic description is the more appropriate theoretical approach and is necessary in order to better understand the microscopic physical phenomena that underlie all fluid models. Microscopic solar-wind parameters characteristic of conditions during the observations were used, together with the quasi-linear plasma-kinetic theory, to compute the expected magnetic field and temperature enhancements in the interaction region between two counterstreaming plasma beams. The physical mechanism of excitation is the electromagnetic two-stream instability in which Alfven waves are unstable. A total field in the interaction region of about 8 gamma and a change in temperature of about 100,000 K are obtained.
The description of a multifluid code with anomalous transport coefficients due to plasma instabilities self consistently followed in space and time is given. As an example, simulations of colliding solar wind streamers are presented. The results compare favorably with the observations.
A collision between two gas clouds with initial densities of approximately 10 million per cu cm, velocities of about 1000 km/s, and radii of approximately 1 pc is investigated quantitatively by coupling a calculation of the radiation spectrum resulting from the anticipated shock fronts with a computation for the conversion of this high-energy radiation into optical emission in adjacent photoionized regions. The detailed structure of the colliding clouds is discussed, and the effects of an ambient magnetic field are considered. The combined emission-line spectrum is presented along with continuum emission estimates for thermal, synchrotron, and very-high-energy bremsstrahlung mechanisms. It is shown that significant continua can be produced over the range from 300 microns to 3 keV, including a blackbody contribution from a high-density neutral region between the shock fronts, free-free and free-bound radiation from the cooling zones directly behind the shocks, and free-free, free-bound, and two-photon radiation from the photoionized regions immediately ahead of and behind the cooling zones. The theoretical spectrum of the structure resulting from the collision is found to be similar in general and in some details to those observed for typical quasars.
Conditions leading to the truncation, at the 2:1 resonance, of a disk of infrequently colliding particles surrounding the primary of a binary system are studied numerically and analytically. Attention is given to the case in which the mass ratio, q, is sufficiently small (less than about 0.1) and the radius of the disk centered on the primary allowably larger, so that first-order orbit-orbit resonances between ring material and the secondary can lie within it. Collisions are found to be less frequent than q to the -2/3 power orbital periods (the period of the forced eccentricity at the 2:1 resonance), and truncation occurs and Kirkwood gaps are produced only if the particle eccentricity is less than some critical value, estimated to be of order q to the 5/9 power, or approximately 0.02 for the sun-Jupiter case having q equal to 10 to the -3rd power.
High dispersion spectra of Plaskett's star (HD 47129) were obtained with the short wavelength spectrograph on IUE at five phases of the binary cycle. The unsaturated wind profiles, particularly those of Si IV lambda 1400, show complex phase dependent structure. Two interpretations for the structure are suggested, neither of which is entirely satisfactory: (1) the structure is a consequence of directed streams, and (2) the structure is a consequence of colliding winds from the primary and secondary.
At energies lower than 2.5 X 10 to the 5 GeV (in Lab. system), more accurate information on nucleon-nucleon collision (p-p collider and on primary composition now exist. The behavior of those both basic elements in cosmic ray phenomenology from ISR energy suggests some tendencies for reasonable extrapolation in the next decade 2.0x10 to the 5 to 2.0x10 to the 6 GeV. Small showers in altitude, recorded in the decade 2 X 10 to the 4 to 2 X 10 to the 5 GeV offers a good tool to testify the validity of all the Monte-Carlo simulation analysis and appreciate how nucleon-air collision are different from nucleon-nucleon collisions.
It is generally assumed that an ensemble of small bodies located in similar Keplarian orbits will, because of collisions, tend to disperse into more and more dissimilar orbits. For example, it is thought that the asteroids may represent the remnants of a few larger bodies that broke up or failed to fully accrete. A proposed experiment using the space station consists of an ensemble of small bodies or particles released gently from a central location in a large chamber, much like the breaking of billiard balls. The particles would them co-orbit and occasionally collide. Their subsequent behavior could be monitored by several video recorders, their linear and angular velocities before and after collision calculated, and their general behavior studied. This experiment could yield results of fundamental importance for theories of the origin of the planets, asteroids, comets, and probably ring systems.
It is proposed that a collision between a Mars-sized planetesimal and the protoearth explains both the anomalously large angular momentum of the earth-moon system and the similarity between the moon's bulk composition and the earth's mantle. An approximate calculation was performed to obtain information on the highest speed, most highly shocked ejecta and the ejection pattern, speed, angles of launch, etc. as a function of the impact parameter and the ratio of the sizes of the colliding protoplanets. Computation results are in agreement with the megaimpact hypothesis.
Ground-baed observations of the object IRAS 14348-1447, which was discovered with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, show that it is an extremely luminous colliding galaxy system that emits more than 95 percent of its energy at FIR wavelengths. IRAS 14348-1447, which is receeding from the sun at 8 percent of the speed of light, has a bolometric luminosity more than 100 times larger than that of the Galaxy, and is therefore as luminous as optical quasars. New optical, infrared, and spectroscopic measurements suggest that the dominant luminosity source is a dust-enshrouded quasar. The fuel for the intense activity is an enormous supply of molecular gas. Carbon monoxide emission has been detected at a wavelength of 2.6 millimeters by means of a new, more sensitive receiver recently installed on the 12-meter telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. IRAS 14348-1447 is the most distant and luminous source of carbon monoxide line emission yet detected.
CCD imaging data of the elliptical galaxies NGC 4782 and NGC 4783 have been analyzed along with published spectroscopic measurements in order to develop a viable interaction model for this system. The best-fit model suggests that the binary orbit was hyperbolic before the encounter, but that the energy loss during the collision has led to a loosely bound system. The total system mass in the region occupied by the luminous matter is shown to be 1.4 x 10 to the 12th solar masses. The results support the previous theory that the internal velocity dispersions of colliding galaxies tend to increase just past closest approach.
Quenching cross sections, sigma(Q), were measured for A 2Sigma(+) OH for a variety of colliders, using the pressure dependence of time-resolved laser-induced fluorescence to obtain quenching cross sections. The OH radicals, produced in a discharge or by photolysis, were maintained in the excited state at 300 K by an Ar buffer bath. It was found that quenching by CF4 and C2F6 the cross sections are very small. For Kr and Ze, the sigma(Q) values were found to be 8 and 27 sq A, respectively. For O2, sigma(Q) was 18 sq A, and for H2O, sigma(Q) was 80 sq A.
Collisions between galaxies can induce large morphological changes in the participants and, in the case of colliding disk galaxies, bridges and tails are often formed. Observations of such systems indicate a wide variation in color (see Larson and Tinsley, 1978) and that some of the particpants are experiencing enhanced rates of star formation, especially in their central regions (Bushouse 1986, 1987; Kennicutt et al., 1987, Bushouse, Lamb, and Werner, 1988). Here the authors describe progress made in understanding some of the dynamics of interacting galaxies using N-body stellar dynamical computer experiments, with the goal of extending these models to include a hydrodynamical treatment of the gas so that a better understanding of globally enhanced star formation will eventually be forthcoming. It was concluded that close interactions between galaxies can produce large perturbations in both density and velocity fields. The authors measured, via computational experiments that represent a galaxy's stars, average radial velocity flows as large as 100 km/sec and 400 percent density increases. These can occur in rings that move outwards through the disk of a galaxy, in roughly homologous inflows toward the nucleus, and in off center, non-axisymmetric regions. Here the authors illustrate where the gas is likely to flow during the early stages of interaction and in future work they plan to investigate the fate of the gas more realistically by using an N-body/Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics code to model both the stellar and gaseous components of a disk galaxy during a collision. Specifically, they will determine the locations of enhanced gas density and the strength and location of shock fronts that form during the interaction.
A study of the stellar wind properties of O-type close binary systems is presented. The main objective of this program was to search for colliding winds in four systems, AO Cas, iota Ori, Plaskett's star, and 29 UW CMa, through an examination of high dispersion UV spectra from IUE and optical spectra of the H alpha and He I lambda 6678 emission lines.
AO Cas, a short-period, double-lined spectroscopic binary, is studied as part of a search for spectroscopic evidence of colliding stellar winds in binary systems of O-type stars. High S/N ratio spectra of the H-alpha and He I 6678-A line profiles are presented, and their orbital-phase-related variations are examined in order to derive the location and motions of high-density circumstellar gas in the system. These profile variations are compared with those observed in the UV stellar wind lines in IUE archival spectra. IUE spectra are also used to derive a system mass ratio by constructing cross-correlation functions of a single-lined phase spectrum with each of the other spectra. The resulting mass ratio is consistent with the rotational line broadening of the primary star, if the primary is rotating synchronously with the binary system. The best-fit models were found to have an inclination of 61.1 deg + or - 3.0 deg and have a primary which is close to filling its critical Roche lobe.
We present a description of an experiment which can be used to search for effects of strong electromagnetic fields on the production of e(sup +) e(sup -) pairs in the elastic scattering of two heavy ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). A very brief discussion of other possible studies of electromagnetic phenomena at RHIC is also presented.