Bow shocks, bow waves, and dust waves. I. Strong coupling limit

Abstract

Dust waves and bow waves result from the action of a star's radiation pressure on a stream of dusty plasma that flows past it. They are an alternative mechanism to hydrodynamic bow shocks for explaining the curved arcs of infrared emission seen around some stars. When gas and grains are perfectly coupled, for a broad class of stellar parameters, wind-supported bow shocks predominate when the ambient density is below 100 per cubic cm. At higher densities radiation-supported bows can form, tending to be optically thin bow waves around B stars, or optically thick bow shocks around early O stars. For OB stars with particularly weak stellar winds, radiation-supported bows become more prevalent.

10 pages, 8 figures, MNRAS accepted (revisions: Fig 5 split into 3 parts and captions expanded; fixed arXiv links in reference list)

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• The Milky Way Project Second Data Release: Bubbles and Bow Shocks
• Wind nebulae and supernova remnants of very massive stars
• Bow shocks, bow waves, and dust waves. II. Beyond the rip point