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If a massive star is a runaway star, it can form an infrared bow-shock that is detectable in 24 μm and sometimes in 8μm of the Spitzer Space Telescope or the W3/W4-channels of WISE. In 2016 Kobulnicky et al. created the largest spitzer/WISE bow-shock catalog to date with 709 bow-shock candidates. [17]
The distance from Earth to the subsolar magnetopause varies over time due to solar activity, but typical distances range from 6–15 R. Empirical models [8] [9] using real-time solar wind data can provide a real-time estimate of the magnetopause location. A bow shock stands upstream from the magnetopause. It serves to decelerate and deflect the ...
A bow shock, also called a detached shock or bowed normal shock, is a curved propagating disturbance wave characterized by an abrupt, nearly discontinuous, change in pressure, temperature, and density. It occurs when a supersonic flow encounters a body, around which the necessary deviation angle of the flow is higher than the maximum achievable ...
Earth's bow shock is about 17 kilometers (11 mi) thick [12] and located about 90,000 kilometers (56,000 mi) from Earth. [13] The magnetopause exists at a distance of several hundred kilometers above Earth's surface. Earth's magnetopause has been compared to a sieve because it allows solar wind particles to enter.
A study of Earth's bow shock was conducted as Galileo passed by Earth's day side. The solar wind travels at 200 to 800 kilometers per second (120 to 500 mi/s) and is deflected by Earth's magnetic field , creating a magnetic tail on Earth's dark side over a thousand times the radius of the planet.
The magnetosheath is the region of space between the magnetopause and the bow shock of a planet's magnetosphere.The regularly organized magnetic field generated by the planet becomes weak and irregular in the magnetosheath due to interaction with the incoming solar wind, and is incapable of fully deflecting the highly charged particles.
Such shocks are formed by photons colliding with the electrons of the matter, and the downstream of these shocks is dominated by radiation energy density rather than thermal energy of matter. An important type of astrophysical shock is the relativistic shock, in which the shock velocity is a non-negligible fraction of the speed of light.
When stars are moving at sufficiently high peculiar velocities, their astrospheres can generate bow shocks as they collide with the interstellar medium. For decades it was assumed that the Sun had a bow shock. In 2012, data from Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and NASA's Voyager probes showed