Energy Balance and Structural Regimes of Radiative Shocks in Optically Thick Media

Radiative shocks in optically thick media are of fundamental interest. They exist in various astrophysical circumstances, and are likely to be explored in future experiments. This paper presents the relevant fluid theory for arbitrary initial conditions. In the approximation that the shock structure has three distinct layers, it uses energy-balance arguments to provide a semiquantitative assessment of key features of these systems and uses an approximate treatment of radiative transfer to obtain the shock structure