Do young stars blow bubbles or dig tunnels as they age?
DOI: 10.1063/1.2998966
“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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