Oded Regev (physicist)

Oded Regev (born 1946) is a physicist and astrophysicist, professor emeritus of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

His early numerical calculations (with G. Shaviv) of a rotating gas sphere gravitational collapse (1980) were the first to show that a central object (a star) is formed surrounded by a protoplanetary disk-like nebula, provided turbulent viscosity is included.

[1] Together with J.R. Buchler he found a simplistic model of a stellar oscillator that exhibited chaotic pulsation.

In his later years he concentrated on theory of accretion disks applying mathematical approximation methods that were novel to astrophysics.

He investigated instabilities of accretion disks that may give rise to angular momentum transport, excluding the possibility that the magneto-rotational instability may develop beyond linear stage in thin, disks with very low magnetic Prandtl number as such structures usually are.