Related papers: Energetics of nearby stellar bow shocks
Massive stars moving at supersonic peculiar velocities through the interstellar medium (ISM) can create bow shocks, arc-like structures at the interface between the stellar wind and the ISM. Many such bow shocks have been detected and…
Runaway stars with peculiar high velocities can generate stellar bow shocks. Only a few bow shocks show clear radio emission. Our goal is to identify and characterize new stellar bow shocks around O and Be runaway stars in the infrared…
Runaway, massive stars are not among the most numerous. However, the bow shocks built by their supersonic movement in the interstellar medium have been detected in the infrared range in many cases. Most recently, the stellar bow shocks have…
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…
Context. There is a population of runaway stars that move at extremely high speeds with respect to their surroundings. The fast motion and the stellar wind of these stars, plus the wind-medium interaction, can lead to particle acceleration…
We provide an up-to-date summary of the current observational and theoretical studies of stellar bow-shock sources close to the Galactic centre. The symmetry axis of a bow shock provides the information on the relative motion of the star…
Pulsars have mean space velocities >~500 km/s. The consequent ram pressure results in tight confinement of the star's energetic wind, driving a bow shock into the surrounding medium. Pulsar bow shocks have long been regarded as a curiosity,…
We aim to interpret the radio emission of stellar bow shocks and assess under which conditions it could be either thermal or non-thermal, and how to use the observational data to infer their physical properties. We used an extended…
Bow shocks generated from the interaction of winds from massive runaway stars with the interstellar medium have been shown to be prominent particle accelerators through recent $\gamma$-ray and radio synchrotron observations. Here, we study…
Massive stars drive strong winds that impact the surrounding interstellar medium, producing parsec-scale bubbles for isolated stars and superbubbles around young clusters. These bubbles can be observed across the electromagnetic spectrum,…
Pulsar wind nebulae are now well established as important probes both of neutron stars' relativistic winds and of the surrounding interstellar medium. Amongst this diverse group of objects, pulsar bow shocks have long been regarded as an…
Context. Stellar bow shocks have been studied not only observationally, but also theoretically since the late 1980s. Only a few catalogues of them exist. The bow shocks show emission along all the electromagnetic spectrum, but they are…
The bow shocks of runaway stars with strong stellar winds of over 2000 km s$^{-1}$ can serve as particle acceleration sites. The conversion from stellar wind luminosity into particle acceleration power has an efficiency of the same order of…
Runaway stars form bow shocks by sweeping up interstellar matter in their direction of motion. Theoretical models predict a spectrally wide non-thermal component reaching up to gamma-ray energies at a flux level detectable with current…
We assess the multi-wavelength observable properties of the bow shock around a runaway early type star using a combination of hydrodynamical modelling, radiative transfer calculations and synthetic imaging. Instabilities associated with the…
Stellar bow shocks, bow waves, and dust waves all result from the action of a star's wind and radiation pressure on a stream of dusty plasma that flows past it. The dust in these bows emits prominently at mid-infrared wavelengths in the…
Bow shocks around massive stars have primarily been detected in IR emission, but radio detections are becoming more frequent with the commissioning of sensitive and large field-of-view interferometers. Radio data probes both thermal and…
The understanding of the particle spectra resulting from acceleration in relativistic shocks as they occur in extragalactic sources, is essential for the interpretation of the cosmic ray spectrum above the ankle ($E_p>3\cdot 10^{18}$ eV).…
Massive stars that travel at supersonic speeds can create bow shocks as their stellar winds interact with the surrounding interstellar medium. These bow shocks - prominent sites for mechanical feedback of individual massive stars - are…
Runaway stars form bow shocks by ploughing through the interstellar medium at supersonic speeds and are promising sources of non-thermal emission of photons. One of these objects has been found to emit non-thermal radiation in the radio…