Turbulence and Magnetic Reconnection in the Interstellar Medium

Summary

Magnetic reconnection is often assumed to occur at an enhanced rate in the interstellar medium because of the effects of small scale turbulence. This effect is not modelled directly in numerical simulations, but is accounted for by explicitly assuming the resistivity is large, or assuming that numerical resistivity mimics the effect of small scale turbulence. The effective resistivity really is large only if the field can rapidly reconnect. In this paper I discuss two physical mechanisms for fast magnetic reconnection in the interstellar medium: enhanced diffusion at stagnation points, and formation of current sheets.

Introduction

Numerical experiments are making important contributions to the study of turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM). Since any numerical simulation is restricted in the range of spatial and temporal scales which it can describe, it is important to develop a prescription for treating the effects of turbulence at the smallest scales, which are generally omitted from this range. Although very little energy resides at the smallest scales, the small scale motions dramatically increase momentum and magnetic flux transport in the ISM, and can also produce rapid thermal and chemical mixing. The most common way to account for these subgridscale effects is to simply assume that the viscosity, electrical resistivity, and other transport coefficients are much larger than their molecular values. The difficult problem of justifying this approach and calculating the so-called eddy diffusivities has received more attention in the atmospheric and stellar turbulence communities than it has, so far, among interstellar turbulence theorists.