#bow shock

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

The Best of FYFD 2025

Happy 2026! This will be a big year for me. I'll be finishing up and turning in the manuscript for my first book -- which flows between cutting edge research, scientists' stories, and the societal impacts of fluid physics. It's a culmination of 15 years of FYFD, rendered into narrative. I'm so excited to share it with you when it's published in 2027. In the meantime, though, check out the top posts from FYFD in 2025! 

(Image credits: droplet - F. Yu et al., starlings - K. Cooper, espresso - YouTube/skunkay, fountain - Primal Space, Uranus - NASA, turbulence - C. Amores and M. Graham, capsule - A. Álvarez and A. Lozano-Duran, melting ice - S. Bootsma et al., puquios - Wikimedia, cooling towers - BBC, solar wind - NASA/APL/NRL, Lake Baikal - K. Makeeva, sprite - NASA, roots - W. van Egmond, sunflowers - Deep Look)

[quiltofstars]

LDN 204 (left) and ζ Ophiuchi (top right) // Gary Seven

The star ζ Ophiuchi is barreling through space at a speed of over 67,000 miles per hour. Since this area is rich in dust, it's creating a bow shock in front of it!

[radiantheaven]

Bow Shock Around LL Orionis

Named for the crescent-shaped wave made by a ship as it moves through water, a bow shock can be created in space when streams of gas collide. This image captures the bow shock around the star LL Orionis.

[brightestofcentaurus]

Orion Nebula

"Astronomers using NASA Hubble Space Telescope have found a bow shock around a very young star in the nearby Orion nebula, an intense star-forming region of gas and dust."

Image and information from NASA.

[leftovies]

The first one is just gibberish.

The world isn't really a globe but it sure goes around.

[therealuniverse]

As a star travels through space, the energetic particles it emits crash into the gas between the stars, creating a type of cosmic shock wave. In other words, the solar wind produced by stars interacts with the interstellar medium, creating what is known as a bow shock; imagine the effect a speeding boat has on the water it is passing through. Many stars produce a bow shock, however, this effect is often not visible.

In the case of the speedy supergiant star Alpha Camelopardalis, the bow shock is highly visible. Traveling between 1.5 and 9.4 million miles per hour, the star is approximately 27 times the mass of our Sun and 500,000 times as luminous. At this speed, Alpha Cam could travel from New York City to San Francisco in less than one second. The method by which the star gained its high speed is unknown - possibly it was propelled by a nearby supernova explosion or interaction with a star cluster. Due to the fact that the star is a supergiant, it emits an extremely strong solar wind, which is accentuated by the star's extreme speed. The accelerated wind compresses the interstellar gas, causing it to heat up, shining in infrared light. Alpha Cam is the large star in the center of the image. Sources/Further Reading: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/newsfeatures.cfm?release=2011-077 http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061124.html -Kahlil (image credit NASA/JPL)

[xivartref]

GNB Bow Shock

[cosmicvastness]

Zeta Oph: Runaway Star 

Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi produces the arcing interstellar bow wave or bow shock seen in this stunning infrared portrait. In the false-color view, bluish Zeta Oph, a star about 20 times more massive than the Sun, lies near the center of the frame, moving toward the left at 24 kilometers per second. Its strong stellar wind precedes it, compressing and heating the dusty interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front. What set this star in motion? Zeta Oph was likely once a member of a binary star system, its companion star was more massive and hence shorter lived. When the companion exploded as a supernova catastrophically losing mass, Zeta Oph was flung out of the system. About 460 light-years away, Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust. The image spans about 1.5 degrees or 12 light-years at the estimated distance of Zeta Ophiuchi.

Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Spitzer Space Telescope