Interaction between massive star winds and the interstellar medium

TL;DR

This paper reviews how massive star winds interact with the interstellar medium, creating observable bubbles and bow shocks, and discusses recent observational and simulation advances that enhance understanding of stellar feedback processes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent observational and simulation progress in understanding wind bubbles and bow shocks around massive stars, highlighting physical processes shaping these nebulae.

Findings

Infrared, radio, and X-ray observations reveal detailed structures of wind bubbles.

Simulations help test physical processes like thermal conduction and instabilities.

Quantitative comparisons improve understanding of stellar wind feedback.

Abstract

Massive stars drive strong winds that impact the surrounding interstellar medium, producing parsec-scale bubbles for isolated stars and superbubbles around young clusters. These bubbles can be observed across the electromagnetic spectrum, both the wind itself and the swept up interstellar gas. Runaway massive stars produce bow shocks that strongly compresses interstellar gas, producing bright infrared, optical and radio nebulae. With the detection of non-thermal radio emission from bow shocks, particle acceleration can now also be investigated. I review research on wind bubbles and bow shocks around massive stars, highlighting recent advances in infrared, radio and X-ray observations, and progress in multidimensional simulations of these nebulae. These advances enable quantitative comparisons between theory and observations and allow to test the importance of some physical processes such as thermal conduction and Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in shaping nebulae and in constraining the energetics of stellar-wind feedback to the interstellar medium.