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PIA20062: Bow Shocks in Space
Bow shocks thought to mark the paths of massive, speeding stars are highlighted in these images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
 Mission:  Spitzer Space Telescope 
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) 
 Instrument:  Spitzer Space Telescope 
WISE Telescope 
 Product Size:  2106 x 706 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  IPAC-Caltech 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA20062.tif (4.022 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA20062.jpg (177.7 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

click here for Figure 1 for PIA20062click here for Figure 2 for PIA20062click here for Figure 3 for PIA20062
Spitzer
High resolution TIFF file		Spitzer
High resolution TIFF file		WISE
High resolution TIFF file
Click on an individual image for larger views

Bow shocks thought to mark the paths of massive, speeding stars are highlighted in these images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

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 stars also produce high-speed winds that smack into this compressed material. The end result is pile-up of heated material that glows in infrared light. In these images, infrared light has been assigned the colored red.

Green shows wispy dust in the region and blue shows stars.

The two images at left are from Spitzer, and the one on the right is from WISE.

The speeding stars thought to be creating the bow shocks can be seen at the center of each arc-shaped feature. The image at right actually consists of two bow shocks and two speeding stars. All the speeding stars are massive, ranging from about 8 to 30 times the mass of our sun.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer and http://spitzer.caltech.edu.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wyoming

Image Addition Date:
2016-01-05