Ram-pressure balance surfaces for an outwardly accelerating stellar wind bow shock

Abstract

We study the problem of a stellar wind bowshock (produced by an isotropic wind/plane flowing environment interaction) that lies within the wind acceleration region in the simple, rampressure balance approximation.We show that this problem has a simple, approximate analytic solution that produces reasonably accurate results when applied to wind velocity profiles appropriate for radiatively driven winds. These solutions should be useful for initializing numerical simulations and for evaluating whether or not the simulations are giving physically reasonable solutions. Also, our analytic solutions should be useful in the interpretation of observations without the necessity of having to perform complex numerical simulations. © 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.