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Don Cox is the professor around whom the ISM theory effort centers. In recent years he has found himself with so much work left to do with former grad students and so many unfinished projects that he has decided not to have any more new grad students until he gets caught up, maybe never. Since professors can't get anything done by themselves, that means that he hires undergrads as well as attempting to choreograph the efforts of his far flung collection of former students. He presently has one terminal master's student, Mike Walters, who will finish in December 1997, and two undergraduates, Andy Pawl and Angel Klohs, working with him.
Current projects include:
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1) The development of a fast and reliable approximation for the non-
equilibrium cooling rate coefficient for high temperature plasmas, for use
in multidimensional hydrocodes which need it desperately.
2) Modeling the formation of a shell of hydrogen around quasars and young galaxies, driven by the readiation pressure of Lyman alpha.
3) A comprehensive model of the supernova remnant W44, including explanations for its unusual centrally brightened x-ray emission, its expanding hydrogen shell, its radio continuum, and its optical luminosity, as well as its nonspherical geometry.
4) Modeling spiral density waves as hydraulic jumps.
5) Providing strong limits on the quantities of various consitituents and rates of various processes that have been imagined to be occurring in the interstellar medium.
6) Modeling the Local Bubble, in which the Solar System finds itself, as the remnant of a series of about three nearby superniova explosions in the last 10 million years or so.
7) Modeling the evolution of supernova remnants in the halo of the Galaxy.
8) Examining the possibility that much of the interstellar volume is largely devoid of matter, though occupied by magnetic field and cosmic rays.
9) Worrying about what the evolution of a supernova would be like if it occurred in such a largely empty region.
The whole is aimed in the long term at helping better to understand the way in which the interstellar medium controls the galactic machine and regulates its evolution.
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Last modified by Bradford Benson on August,7 1997.