Fluid Dynamics of Supernova Remnants

Supernovae – explosions of stars – are a central problem in astrophysics since they encapsulate the entire process of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis. Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) and Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) instabilities, developing during the supernova blast, lead to intense mixing of the star’s materials and couple astrophysical to atomic scales. We handle fluid dynamics challenges of RT/RM problem by directly linking the conservation laws governing RT/RM dynamics to symmetry-based momentum model, by precisely deriving the model parameters in the scale-dependent and scale-invariant regimes, and exactly integrating the model equations for variable acceleration in the scale-dependent linear and nonlinear regimes and in self-similar mixing regime. The theory outcomes explain the observations of supernova remnants, yield the design of scaled laboratory experiments for quantification of RT/RM dynamics in high energy density settings, and find that supernovae can indeed be regarded as an astrophysical initial value problem.