The heliosphere is an invisible giant bubble that protects the entire solar system from being bombarded by cosmic radiation, and mainstream models suggest the heliosphere is shaped like a croissant. Recently, astronomers analyzed the data of NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Probe and Voyager Probe to obtain snapshots of terminal shock waves and the shape of the heliopause, and newly discovered that there is a corrugated structure at the edge of the solar system.
Previous studies have shown that the region where the solar wind begins to slow down due to contact with the interstellar medium is called the termination shock, and the boundary where the solar wind can no longer resist the pressure exerted by interstellar space is called the heliopause, including the above The region’s overall invisible magnetic bubble is called the Heliosphere.
Voyager 1 and 2 have both passed the boundary of the heliopause and continue to send back sensing data from the vast interstellar space. In addition, NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) orbiting the Earth in 2009 to study the boundary features of the solar system.
By analyzing data from three detectors, a research team from Princeton University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, the University of Waikato, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Southwest Research Institute found that the pressure exerted by the solar wind suddenly changed in 2014. After measuring the charged neutral atoms produced when the solar wind collides with the interstellar wind, further modeling in an echolocation-like manner resulted in the discovery of corrugated structures such as giant ripples from the boundary region of the solar system.
While we already know that the size and overall shape of the heliosphere can distort with the solar cycle, the new study found that the distance at which the reflected waves return to the heliopause also varies considerably, suggesting that its shape is not uniform and for unknown reasons The ever-changing, or non-uniform symmetry of the bubbles around the solar system, is so large that it stretches 16 AU.
The Interstellar Boundary Probe mission is nearing its end and is expected to be replaced by NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) in 2025, which has a larger observation range, accuracy, and resolution. In addition to mapping the sky more frequently, it will also travel to the L1 Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system, just like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The new paper is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
(Source of the first image: NASA)
Further reading:
New technological knowledge, updated from time to time