Thermal damping of Weak Magnetosonic Turbulence in the Interstellar Medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates how radiative cooling causes thermal damping of magnetosonic waves in the interstellar medium, significantly affecting turbulence dissipation and cascade processes.

Contribution

It introduces a generic mechanism for thermal damping via radiative cooling and models its impact on magnetosonic turbulence in the ISM.

Findings

Thermal damping increases the cutoff wavelength for turbulence.

Numerical simulations confirm the impact on wave cascade.

Thermal damping can enlarge the dissipation scale by tens to hundreds of times.

Abstract

We present a generic mechanism for the thermal damping of compressive waves in the interstellar medium (ISM), occurring due to radiative cooling. We solve for the dispersion relation of magnetosonic waves in a two-fluid (ion-neutral) system in which density- and temperature-dependent heating and cooling mechanisms are present. We use this dispersion relation, in addition to an analytic approximation for the nonlinear turbulent cascade, to model dissipation of weak magnetosonic turbulence. We show that in some ISM conditions, the cutoff wavelength for magnetosonic turbulence becomes tens to hundreds of times larger when the thermal damping is added to the regular ion-neutral damping. We also run numerical simulations which confirm that this effect has a dramatic impact on cascade of compressive wave modes.