Bow shock

In astrophysics, a bow shock triggers when the magnetosphere of an astrophysical object interacts with the nearby flowing ambient plasma such as the solar wind. For Earth and other magnetized planets, it is the border at which the speed of the stellar wind suddenly drops as a result of its approach to the magnetopause. For stars, this border is usually the edge of the astrosphere, where the stellar wind meets the interstellar medium.
Description
The defining judging requirement of a shock wave is that the bulk velocity (speed) of the plasma drops from "supersonic" to "subsonic", where the speed of sound cs is defined by
where is the ratio of specific heats, is the pressure, and is the density of the plasma.
A common difficulty in astrophysics is the presence of a magnetic field. For example, the charged particles making up the solar wind follow spiral paths along magnetic field lines. The velocity (speed) of each particle as it moves around a field line can be treated similarly to a thermal velocity in an ordinary gas, and in an ordinary gas the mean thermal velocity is about the speed of sound. At the bow shock, the bulk forward velocity of the wind (which is the part of the velocity parallel to the field lines about which the particles moving in a spiral path.) drops below the speed at which the particles are moving at a spiral path.
Around the Earth
The best-studied example of a bow shock is that it occurs where the Sun's wind encounters Earth's magnetopause, although bow shocks occur around all planets, also unmagnetized, such as Mars and Venus and magnetized, such as Jupiter or Saturn. Earth's bow shock is about 17 kilometres thick and located about 90,000 km from the planet.
At comets
Bow shocks form at comets as a result of the interaction between the solar wind and the cometary ionosphere. Far away from the Sun, a comet is an icy boulder without an atmosphere. As it approaches the Sun, the heat of the sunlight causes gas to be released from the cometary nucleus, creating an atmosphere called a coma. The coma is partially ionized by the sunlight, and when the solar wind passes through this ion coma, the bow shock appears.
The first observations were made in the 1980s and 90s as several spacecraft flew by comets which were 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, Halley's Comet, and 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. It was then found that the bow shocks at comets are wider and more gradual than the sharp planetary bow shocks seen at for example Earth. These observations were all made near perihelion when the bow shocks already were fully developed.
The Rosetta spacecraft followed comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from far out in the solar system, at a distance of 3.6 AU from the Sun, in toward perihelion at 1.24 AU, and back out again. This allowed Rosetta to observe the bow shock as it formed when the outgassing increased during the comet's journey toward the Sun. In this early state of development the shock was called the "infant bow shock". The infant bow shock is asymmetric and, relative to the distance to the nucleus, wider than fully developed bow shocks.
Around the Sun
For many decades, the solar wind has been thought to form a bow shock at the edge of the heliosphere, where it collides with the surrounding interstellar medium. Moving away from the Sun, the point where the solar wind flow becomes subsonic is the termination shock, the point where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance is the heliopause, and the point where the flow of the interstellar medium becomes subsonic would be the bow shock. This solar bow shock was thought to lie at a distance around 230 AU from the Sun, more than twice the distance of the termination shock as encountered by the Voyager spacecraft.
However, data obtained in 2012 from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer Spacecraft indicates the lack of any solar bow shock. Along with present results from the Voyager spacecraft, these findings have motivated some theoretical improvement; current thinking is that formation of a bow shock is prevented, at least in the galactic region through which the Sun is passing, by a combination of the strength of the local interstellar magnetic-field and of the relative velocity of the heliosphere.
Around other stars
In 2006, a far infrared bow shock was detected near the AGB star, R Hydrae.
Bow shocks are also a common feature in Herbig Haro objects, in which a much stronger collimated outflow of gas and dust from the star interacts with the interstellar medium, producing bright bow shocks that are visible at optical wavelengths.
Around massive stars
If a massive star is a runaway star, it can form an infrared bow-shock that is detectable in 24 mm and sometimes in 8mm of the Spitzer Space Telescope or the W3/W4-channels of the satelite, WISE. In 2016 Kobulnicky et al. did create the largest spitzer/WISE bow-shock catalog to date with 709 bow-shock candidates. To get a larger bow-shock catalog The Milky Way Project (a Citizen Science project) aims to map infrared bow-shocks in the galactic plane. This larger catalog will help to understand the stellar wind of massive stars.
The closest stars with bow-shocks are:
Magnetic draping effect
A similar effect, known as the magnetic draping effect, occurs when a super-Alfvenic plasma flow impacts an unmagnetized object such as what happens when the solar wind reaches the ionosphere of Venus: the flow deflects around the object draping the magnetic field along the wake flow.