The structure of a spherical, radiative, interstellar shock wave (e.g., a supernova remnant or a stellar wind bubble) is derived under the assumption that the cooling rate per unit volume has the form Λ ∝ ρT for T above a cutoff temperature Tc and Λ = 0 for T below Tc. In the limit of short cooling time and large isothermal cooling Mach number, the flow has an exact analytic solution. Three-dimensional linear stability analyses of the analytic solutions have been performed. The results demonstrate that the radiative phase of shock evolution cannot be adequately modeled as being spherically symmetric and that high spatial resolution is necessary to follow the growth of instabilities.
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Edmund Bertschinger (1986) studied this question.