I just saw something on TV talking about pictures the James Webb telescope took of the “Cosmic Cliffs”, and it mentioned stellar winds shaping the dust clouds of the nebula.
I thought gravity was kind of the only mover of stuff in space. Now there’s wind in space?
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It’d probably be more intuitive to call it “stellar spray”.
“Wind” implies that there’s already a medium hanging around, and “wind” is just what we call it when it starts to move around. That’s not really what’s going on. There is no medium quite like that in space (I mean, *technically* there is, but the absolutely miniscule amounts of it is not what stellar winds are made of).
What stars (like the sun) are doing is basically sneezing particles outward in all directions at all times. Like when you see a person sneeze in just the right light and you see the spray of droplets fly out into the air. There *is* a kind of flow to it, like wind currents, but it’s not a flow of stuff that was already there, it’s a cascade of stuff being ejected out from a source.
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