Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-astrophysical-fluid-dynamics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/paper-1/1/c/solution

Immediately upstream, free fall from rest at infinity gives . Treat the surface shock as locally planar and stationary, with negligible upstream pressure. The Strong-shock Rankine-Hugoniot conditions for a monatomic gas, , give and . momentum conservation then gives
Use the source's gas-constant convention . The immediate postshock temperature is
Here adiabatic means that the jump does not lose appreciable heat to the surroundings; the shock is nevertheless irreversible and raises entropy. The gas still has velocity immediately downstream, so setting all upstream kinetic energy equal to downstream internal energy would give the wrong coefficient. Later settling, radiative cooling or changing ionization can alter the temperature; they are outside this immediate, fixed-composition perfect-gas jump.

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