“Early type stars blow bubbles in the interstellar medium,” assert John Castor, Richard McCray and Robert Weaver of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and the University of Colorado in a recent paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. These bubbles are seen as arising when the strong wind emanating from a star sweeps up the surrounding interstellar gas and compresses it into a shell. After a million years, such a bubble would have a radius of 30 parsec with a shell, about 4 pc thick, that expands at about 20 km/sec. While this theory is supported by a variety of observational data, it is being compared with an earlier theory postulating hot interstellar tunnels, which explains some of the same data—some of it apparently with greater accuracy.
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November 1975
November 01 1975
Do young stars blow bubbles or dig tunnels as they age?
Physics Today 28 (11), 17–20 (1975);