NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft finds lopsided shape of solar system

William Atkins
Saturday, 05 July 2008 20:06

Science - Space

Voyager 2 is flying near the edge of the solar system. It has sent back important data to NASA showing that the heliosphere (the volume of highly charged particles blown out in all directions from the Sun) is lopsided.



Based on this data, which was announced on Wednesday, July 2, 2008, scientists have formed an educated consensus that the heliosphere is not round-shaped but is shaped like an oblong (a distorted spherical shape, longer than it is wide).

This distorted shape is caused because of a tilted magnetic field in local interstellar space.

The magnetic field, coming from the Milky Way Galaxy surrounding our solar system, contacts the solar system at a different angle on the south when compared to the north direction. Scientists think that turbulence from stellar (star) explosions causes this different in the magnetic field--which, thus, causes the lopsided shape of the solar system, what is called the heliosphere.

What does the heliosphere (the bubble of electrically charged particles produced by the Sun and blown out in all directions) physically look like?

Edward Stone (California Institute of Technology), who is involved in the research with Voyager 2, stated, “Imagine a balloon is being blown up by the solar wind. You might imagine that if you took a balloon, which is mainly spherical, and pushed it against the wall, it would be blunted on one side.” [Reuters: “Solar system a bit squashed, not nicely round”]

More about our new view of the shape of our solar system follows on page two.