Ethan Vishniac

Ethan Tecumseh Vishniac is an American astrophysicist, son of Wolf V. Vishniac, and grandson of Roman Vishniac. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal, Director of the Center for Astrophysical Sciences and a professor of Astronomy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. His wife Ilene Busch-Vishniac, an ex-Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Johns Hopkins, is the newly-appointed Provost and Vice-President (Academic) of McMaster University (effective August, 2007).

Vishniac instability

His best known scientific work is the study of instabilities in expanding blast waves. In Vishniac (1983), he demonstrated that a blast wave expanding in a sufficiently compressible medium would be subject to a linear overstability growing as the square root of time. This is usually known as the Vishniac instability, and generally occurs in any thin enough slab bounded by a shock on one side and a contact discontinuity to a higher temperature region on the other. In Vishniac (1994) he then demonstrated that a thin-enough slab bounded by shocks on both sides is subject to a nonlinear instability, usually described as a nonlinear thin shell instability (NTSI). He has also worked with success in cosmology and the theory of astrophysical dynamos.

References

• Vishniac, E. T. 1983, Astrophys. J., 274, 152
• Vishniac, E. T. 1994, Astrophys. J., 428, 186

External links

• Homepage
• A current list of refereed papers from NASA ADS

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Name	Vishniac, Ethan
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