Abstract
Despite the sphericity of the collapsing stellar core, the birth conditions of neutron stars can be highly nonspherical due to a hydrodynamical instability of the shocked accretion flow. Here we report the first laboratory experiment of a shallow water analogue, based on the physics of hydraulic jumps. Both the experiment and its shallow water modeling demonstrate a robust linear instability and nonlinear properties of symmetry breaking, in a system which is one million times smaller and about one hundred times slower than its astrophysical analogue.
- Received 4 November 2011
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.051103
© 2012 American Physical Society
Viewpoint
Seeing Stellar Explosions with Shallow Water
Published 30 January 2012
Observation of shallow water motion provides a remarkably good way to simulate the shock wave instabilities that occur in exploding stars.
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