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Chapter 4 SHOCK WAVES IN ASTROPHYSICS 1. Physics of the shock waves 6.1. What are the shock waves? Shock waves are found in many high energy astrophysical phenomena and play a key role in many different astrophysical environments like star formation in the spiral arms of galaxies, the high velocity outflows from young stars, extra-galactic radio sources and compact galactic nuclei, and in the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetic field of the Earth. It is a general property of perturbations in a gas that they are propagated away from their source at the speed of sound in the medium. It is therefore obvious that if a disturbance is propagated at a velocity greater than the speed of sound, the disturbance cannot behave like a sound wave at all. There is a discontinuity between the regions behind and ahead of the disturbance and the latter region can have no prior knowledge of its imminent arrival-the sound waves which would transmit the information are propagated at a speed less than that of the disturbance. These discontinuities are called shock waves. They commonly arise in situations such as a) explosions or b) where gases flow past obstacles at supersonic velocity or, equivalently, c) objects move supersonically through a gas. The basic phenomenon is the flow of a gas at a supersonic velocity relative to the local velocity of sound. 6.2. The basic properties of plane shock waves We assume that there is an abrupt discontinuity between the two regions of fluid flow. In the undisturbed region ahead of the shock wave, the gas is at rest with pressure, density and temperature. Behind the shock wave, the gas moves supersonically and its pressure, density and temperature are, and, respectively. It is more convenient to analyze the shock waves in a reference frame moving at velocity in which the shock wave is stationary. Then, the undisturbed gas flows towards the discontinuity at velocity and, when it passes through it, its velocity becomes in the mov