Bow shocks occur when a supersonic flow encounters an obstacle. A prominent example from astrophysics is planetary bow shocks\cite{2008arXiv0808.1701T}. Another common astrophysical scenario where shock waves emerge is when supernova remnants engulf a dense molecular cloud \cite{McKee_1975}. A bow shock has even been observed around a star that moves supersonically relative to the ISM \cite{Noriega_Crespo_1997}.

Bow shocks have been studied extensively, both theoretically \cite{Wilkin_1996,Farris_1994} and numerically \cite{Mohamed_2012, Miceli_2006}. However, all studies were carried out under the assumption of finite Mach number. In this work we rather assume that the incoming matter is cold, so for every finite velocity its Mach number would be infinite. The asymptotic shape far from the obstacle is qualitatively different between the two. In the case of a finite Mach number \(M\), far away from the obstacle the length scale of the obstacle becomes irrelevant, and the shock front coincides with the Mach cone, i.e. a cone with an opening angle \(\alpha=\sin^{-1}\frac{1}{M}\) \cite{LANDAU_1987}. However, as we shall later see, in the case of an infinite Mach number, the shock front is parabolic solid of revolution. For a spherical obstacle of radius \(R_{o}\), the shock front loci in cylindrical coordinates is \(z=\xi\frac{r^{2}}{R_{o}}\), where \(\xi\) is a dimensionless constant. This means that no matter how far from the obstacle, the obstacle’s length scale is never negligible. For a very large Mach number, we should expect that the transition from former to the later should occur where the two curves intersect

The solution described here is asymptotic, which means it is only valid at distances much larger than the obstacle. This means that the solution can only manifest itself high Mach number flows, and even then, it would only occupy the region \(zM^{2}>z\gg R_{o}\).

This paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we describe the complete mathematical formulation. In section 3 we present validation of our analytic results with a numerical simulation. Finally, in section 4, we discuss the results.