Abstract
The interstellar medium is a restless place. Heated by supernova shocks and violent stellar winds; cooling and collapsing into dense molecular clouds which form new stars, new winds, and new supernovae in their turn, it is roiled, churned, and compressed to produce a ramified skein of cooler atomic or molecular gas embedded in hotter ionized phases. The spatial structure of these various thermal phases is driven by the interstellar gas seeking to attain a pressure balance and a dynamic balance between heating and cooling. Many of these phases are in a stochastic pressure balance with one another.
“Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble”
— Shakespeare (Macbeth, Act 4).
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Dopita, M.A., Sutherland, R.S. (2003). Thermal Phases of Diffuse Matter. In: Astrophysics of the Diffuse Universe. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05866-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05866-4_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-07771-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-05866-4
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