Today’s space picture shows rivers of gas and stellar wind smashing together in the Swan nebula. It provides, says NASA, some of the best examples ever seen of the ‘bow shocks’ that form in the turbulence found in star-forming regions.
“The stars are like rocks in a rushing river,” says Matt Povich of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (press release). “Powerful winds from the most massive stars at the centre of the cloud produce a large flow of expanding gas. This gas then piles up with dust in front of winds from other massive stars that are pushing back against the flow.”
The discovery of these particular bow shocks was described in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. Click here for a picture showing them in more detail.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.