Sentences with phrase «bow shock»

Both the speed of stars moving through space and their mass contribute to the size and shapes of bow shocks.

Called bow shocks, these dramatic arc - shaped features in space are helping researchers to uncover massive, so - called runaway stars.

The fliers in this nebula, which appear as two red blobs against a pale green background of radiation, seem to be moving fast enough — about 100,000 miles per hour — to fit Balick's original theory, but they also have backward - pointing bow shocks, as though an even faster wind were coming from behind and pushing past them.

Vidotto and her team calculated the distance from the planet's surface to the front of the apparent bow shock and were surprised that it was more than four times the planet's radius.

Alan Aylward, an astrophysicist at University College London, cautions that a magnetic field may not be the only plausible explanation for the observed bow shock, noting that normal assumptions about atmospheric dynamics may not apply in such exotic environments.

This arc - shaped material heats up and shines with infrared light that is assigned the color red in the many pictures of bow shocks captured by Spitzer and WISE.

Chick and his team used archival infrared data from Spitzer and WISE to identify new bow shocks, including more distant ones that are more difficult to locate.

They then used WIRO to follow up on 80 of these candidates and identify the sources behind the suspected bow shocks.

By comparison, a massive star with a stunning bow shock, called Zeta Ophiuchi (or Zeta Oph), is traveling around the galaxy faster than the sun, at 54,000 mph (24 kilometers per second) relative to its surroundings.

Kobulnicky and Chick belong to a larger team of researchers and students — including Matt Povich from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona — studying bow shocks and massive stars.

Some of the first bow shocks from runaway stars were identified in the 1980s by David Van Buren of NASA's JPL in Pasadena, Calif..

From there, the students found basic bow shock shapes and wrote down their coordinates.

As long predicted, the meteor's initial pinprick of light spreads into a curved bow shock as it plows into the upper atmosphere at supersonic speeds of 71 kilometers per second.

Cosmic bow shocks occur when massive stars zip through space, pushing material ahead of them in the same way that water piles up in front of a race boat.

The strongly bent lateral tails offer the astronomers clues to the geometry of the pulsar, which could be compared to either jet contrails soaring into space, or to a bow shock similar to the shockwave created by a bullet as it is shot through the air.

The imagery revealed a bow shock — like the wave that piles beneath the prow of a moving ship — in front of the star and its smaller companion, Mira B, as well as a wake broken into turbulent knots or loops, according to a report in Nature.

Although the astronomers were not sure their observations would be sensitive enough, they clearly saw a banana - shaped «bow shock» curving away from the more violent star as its wind overwhelmed the weaker outflow of its companion star.

A strong stellar wind from the star Delta Cephei creates a surrounding nebula with a bow shock (upper left), evident in this infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

From the known speed of the star and the size of this bow shock, they could calculate that Delta Cephei must be losing mass at a prodigious rate of about 2000 tons per second — a million times faster than the sun.

Using the sensitive infrared cameras of Spitzer, Marengo and his colleagues discovered a hitherto unknown nebula of gas and dust surrounding Delta Cephei, sporting a bow shock in the direction of the star's motion through the surrounding thin interstellar gas, similar to the bow wave in front of a ship moving through water.

Juno recorded vibrations in interplanetary plasma as it crossed Jupiter's magnetic boundary (the bow shock) on June 24.

This feature is thought to be a bow shock created by the wind flowing from the nearby star Trumpler 14 MJ 218.

The orbit takes the stars far apart for most of the time, but once per orbit they approach very close and the competing solar winds — traveling at 420 kilometers per second from the large star and up to 3000 km / s from the smaller — create a bow shock, heating the gas to tens of millions of degrees.

NASA researchers have used last year's observations to refine computer simulations of the system and to produce 3D printed models (pictured, and available to download), which have helped them discover fingerlike protrusions from the bow shock.

To further explore exoplanet magnetism, the team has put together a list of potential planets that they believe offer the most promising chances to glimpse similar bow shocks.

Earth and Saturn exhibit similar «bow shocks,» but this is the first evidence of a shock surrounding an exoplanet.

«The bow shocks are new laboratories for studying massive stars and answering questions about the fate and evolution of these stars,» he says.

«Once we compared them, we could say, for 90 percent of them, we found another bow shock star,» Munari says.

Earth's sun moves around the Milky Way at a moderate pace, but it is not clear whether it creates a bow shock.

The team plans more observations to confirm the presence of the bow shocks.

The bow shock sweeps back into the shape of an anchor, which grows perhaps 150 meters long — far larger than the walnut - sized meteoroid and longer than researchers expected.

In particular, Boyd notes, the shape and surprisingly large size of the bow shock suggest that particles in the upper atmosphere strip molecules from the meteoroid and quickly form a cloud of hot vapor around it, creating the glow witnessed from the ground.

Material from the bow shock gets heated by friction and then is whipped around and behind the star.

«With the new MMS spacecraft we can, for the first time, resolve the structure of the bow shock at these small scales,» says Andreas Johlander, PhD student at IRF, who led the study.

A new study, by researchers at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Uppsala, shows that these ripples do in fact exist in the Earth's bow shock.

The speeding stars thought to be creating the bow shocks can be seen at the center of each arc - shaped feature.

In the light H alpha we can see how the Hydrogen gas makes a bright «bow shock» as the wind and UV light arrives from Theta 1 Ori C.

This is an artist's concept of the Earth's global magnetic field, with the bow shock.

The bow shock is the blue crescent on the right.

When Juno first entered the Jovian magnetosphere on June 24 the spacecraft's WAVES instrument recorded the powerful sound, called a bow shock, upon entry.

However, in a previous study involving Cluster, plasma turbulence was observed in the magnetosheath, the region between Earth's bow shock, where the solar wind meets the magnetic field of the Earth, and the magnetosphere — the magnetic bubble which surrounds it.