Radiative shock

A shock wave with significant radiation losses in its downstream evolution. Often a narrow dissipative jump initially heats the gas according to adiabatic Rankine-Hugoniot conditions, followed by a much longer radiative cooling layer. The gas's specific entropy increases at the jump and may then fall as radiation carries entropy away. If both distant states have equal temperature, the combined mass and momentum balances give an isothermal shock; the gas's energy flux is not conserved across the whole radiating region.

The distance a downstream fluid element travels while losing a substantial fraction of its thermal energy. Multiplying the immediate downstream velocity by a radiative gas cooling time gives an order-of-magnitude length. A resolved layer instead uses $\ell =\int u(t)dt$, because mass density, temperature and speed change during cooling. It is distinct from the microscopic dissipative thickness of the shock wave.