My single-author ApJL paper on supernova-driven turbulence

My single-author paper, Supernovae Drive Large-scale, Incompressible Turbulence through Small-scale Instabilities, is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 1004, L9.

I study how individual supernova remnants generate incompressible turbulence. Instabilities wrinkle the interface between hot and warm gas, bringing pressure and density gradients out of alignment and generating vorticity. Vortex stretching then allows turbulent motions to escape the shell into the surrounding gas.

The result connects the structure of these thin interfaces to the wider galactic turbulence cascade: small-scale instabilities can supply turbulent motions that an inverse cascade carries to larger scales. Sections III and IV of the paper develop and test this mechanism.

Read the published paper, read the open preprint, or explore the science highlight.