The propagation speed of a circumstellar pattern revealed in the plane of the sky is often assumed to represent the expansion speed of the wind matter ejected from a post-main-sequence star at the center. We point out that the often-adopted isotropic wind assumption and the binary hypothesis as the underlying origin for the circumstellar pattern in the shape of multilayered shells are, however, mutually incompatible. We revisit the hydrodynamic models for spiral-shell patterns induced by the orbital motion of a hypothesized binary, of which one star is losing mass at a high rate. The distributions of transverse wind velocities as a function of position angle in the plane of the sky are explored along viewing directions. The variation of the transverse wind velocity is as large as half the average wind velocity over the entire three dimensional domain in the simulated models investigated in this work. The directional dependence of the wind velocity is indicative of the overall morphology of the circumstellar material, implying that kinematic information is an important ingredient in modeling the snapshot monitoring (often in the optical and near-infrared) or the spectral imaging observations for molecular line emissions.

Dynamical friction plays an important role in reducing angular momenta of objects in orbital motions. While astronomical objects usually follow curvilinear orbits, most previous studies focused on the linear-trajectory cases. Here, we present the gravitational wake due to, and dynamical friction on, a perturber moving on a circular orbit in a uniform gaseous medium using a semi-analytic method. The circular orbit causes the density wakes to bend along the orbit into asymmetric configurations, resulting in the drag forces in both opposite (azimuthal) and lateral (radial) directions to the perturber motion, although the latter does not contribute to the orbital decay much. For a subsonic perturber, the bending of a wake is only modest and the resulting drag force in the opposite direction is remarkably similar to the linear-trajectory counterpart. On the other hand, a supersonic perturber is able to overtake its own wake, possibly multiple times, creating a high-density trailing tail. Despite the dramatic changes in the wake morphologies, the azimuthal drag force is in surprisingly good agreement with the formulae of Ostriker for the linear-trajectory cases, provided Vpt=2Rp, where Vp and Rp are the velocity and orbital radius of the perturber, respectively.

We present wide-field JHKs-band photometric observations of the three compact H II regions G48.9-0.3, G49.0-0.3, and G49.2-0.3 in the active star-forming region W51B. The star clusters inside the three compact H II regions show the excess number of stars in the J-Ks histograms compared with reference fields. While the mean color excess ratio (EJ-H/EH-Ks) of the three compact H II regions are similar to ~2.07 the visual extinctions toward them are somewhat different ~17 mag for G48.9-0.3 and G49.0-0.3; ~23 ≤ 2 Myr The inferred total stellar mass,~1.4x104M⊙, of W51B makes it one of the most active star forming regions in the Galaxy with the star formation efficiency of ~10%.