Ethan Vishniac

Ethan Tecumseh Vishniac is an American astrophysicist, son of Wolf V. Vishniac, and grandson of Roman Vishniac. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal, Director of the Center for Astrophysical Sciences and a professor of Astronomy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. His wife Ilene Busch-Vishniac, an ex-Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Johns Hopkins, was the provost and vice-president (academic) of McMaster University from 2007 until 2011, and announced as president-elect of the University of Saskatchewan on December 19, 2011. She will begin her term on July 1, 2012 as the university's ninth president.

Vishniac instability

His best known scientific work is the study of instabilities in expanding blast waves. In Vishniac (1983), he demonstrated that a blast wave expanding in a sufficiently compressible medium would be subject to a linear overstability growing as the square root of time. This is usually known as the Vishniac instability, and generally occurs in any thin enough slab bounded by a shock on one side and a contact discontinuity to a higher temperature region on the other. In Vishniac (1994) he then demonstrated that a thin-enough slab bounded by shocks on both sides is subject to a nonlinear instability, usually described as a nonlinear thin shell instability (NTSI). He has also worked with success in cosmology and the theory of astrophysical dynamos.

References

• Vishniac, E. T. 1983, Astrophys. J., 274, 152
• Vishniac, E. T. 1994, Astrophys. J., 428, 186

External links

• Homepage
• A current list of refereed papers from NASA ADS