Top Results for Jeans Instability
Sir James Jeans (1877–1946) was an English physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who made substantial contributions to the fields of stellar dynamics and cosmogony. He is best known for formulating the Rayleigh-Jeans law and the concept of Jeans instability, which describes the collapse of inters...
Why this score
Jeans instability and major theoretical contributions remain foundational, although his planetary formation theory and some cosmological views became obsolete.
Scoring methodology
Jeans instability is the gravitational instability of a sufficiently large or dense region within a gas when self-gravity overwhelms the pressure effects that resist compression. The dividing scale is commonly expressed through the Jeans length or Jeans mass, which depends on quantities including de...
