  This article studies the propagation of supersonic radiative Marshak waves.
These waves are radiation dominated, and play an important role in inertial
confinement fusion and in astrophysical and laboratory systems. For that
reason, this phenomenon has attracted considerable experimental attention in
recent decades in several different facilities. The present study integrates
the various experimental results published in the literature, demonstrating a
common physical base. A new simple semi-analytic model is derived and presented
along with advanced radiative hydrodynamic implicit Monte Carlo direct
numerical simulations, which explain the experimental results. This study
identifies the main physical effects dominating the experiments,
notwithstanding their different apparatuses and different physical regimes.
