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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2017
If two rarefied masses of gas collide at a sufficiently high speed, their relative motion will be stopped by a collective plasma instability, rather than by collisions of individual particles. This is true even if the gases are initially non-ionized. In the present note, the possible influence of magnetic fields is ignored for the most part, but a criterion is found to decide under what conditions the collective interaction remains dominant even when they cannot be ignored. It seems that the neglect of magnetic effects may be justified, for example, in the case of two galaxies in collision at a relative speed of 1000 km/sec. The magnetic energy density here is (1/8π)H2∼4X10−12 erg/cm3 (with H∼10−5 gauss), which is much less than the kinetic energy density 1/2NmU2∼8X10−9 erg/cm3 (with N∼1 particle per cm3).
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