"In front of it, a
bow shock develops where atmospheric gases are compressed and heated," NASA (https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/intro.html) explained .
While collisionless shocks had been predicted earlier, the first one that was directly identified, in the 1960s, was the
bow shock formed by the solar wind, a tenuous stream of particles emanating from the sun, when it hits Earth's magnetic field.
Scientists have known that a shock wave--called a "
bow shock"--is generated as the solar wind slams into Earth's magnetic field and that this wave cuts through the solar wind by converting its energy to heat, which is stored in the stream of electrons and ions.
As one of these rocks shoots through the atmosphere, a
bow shock forms around it, with piled-up air in front and a vacuum in the wake.
Another phenomenon that's visible in high-resolution is the wispy
bow shock - named for the crescent-shaped wave made by a ship as it moves through water - created in space when two streams of gas collide.
However, this paper considers that drag reduction mainly depends on wave drag reduction due to flow field reconfiguration, in which the
bow shock is changed into a conical shock interacting with a reattached shock.
In it, a flow of extremely heated air is exiting the 21-inch diameter nozzle from the left, causing a
bow shock to form in front of the ADEPT test article, which is attached to a water-cooled support arm.
The scatter-plots of the velocity perturbations in a vertical plane containing the velocity vector of the parent satellite and in the horizontal plane betray the pattern of a
bow shock, which was likely produced in the medium of gases of combustion.
The instantaneous velocity disturbances along y-axis on the areas of interactions of disturbance wave with the
bow shock and shock layer and inside the boundary layer are significantly affected.
As the magnetosphere plows through space, it sets up a standing bow wave or
bow shock, much like that in front of a moving ship.
Roose," A
bow shock flow containing (almost) all types of ("exotic") MHD discontinu," in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems Theory, Numerics, Applications, M.
Scientists thought a shock wave, or
bow shock, preceded the bubble's journey.