Computing the Dust Distribution in the Bow Shock of a Fast-moving, Evolved Star

We study the hydrodynamical behavior occurring in the turbulent interaction zone of a fast-moving red supergiant star, where the circumstellar and interstellar material collide. In this wind–interstellar-medium collision, the familiar bow shock, contact discontinuity, and wind termination shock morphology form, with localized instability development. Our model includes a detailed treatment of dust grains in the stellar wind and takes into account the drag forces between dust and gas. The dust is treated as pressureless gas components binned per grain size, for which we use 10 representative grain size bins. Our simulations allow us to deduce how dust grains of varying sizes become distributed throughout the circumstellar medium. We show that smaller dust grains (radius