Voyager spacecraft discover how Solar System stays together

William Atkins
Thursday, 24 December 2009 20:38

Science - Space

Two NASA Voyager spacecraft are flying near the edge of the solar system. According to U.S./Russian scientists, the spacecraft have discovered that the 'solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist.'


The 12.23.2009 NASA article “Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery” quotes Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator.


As the Voyager spacecraft—Voyager 1 and Voyager 2— zoom through the outer boundary of the heliosphere (what is called the heliosheath)  on their eventual trip to interstellar space (the space outside of our Solar System), the two voyagers sent back data on the Local Interstellar Cloud, or what is commonly called the “Local Fluff.”

Voyager 1, as of December 2004, began flying through the heliosheath, with Voyager 2, as of August 2007, also entering the heliosheath.

The heliosphere is a magnetic bubble over 10 billion kilometers (six billion miles) in width that engulfs the Solar System. All of the particles contained in the heliosphere come from the Sun, except for some neutral atoms that sneaked into the heliosphere from interstellar space,

It is a “bubble-like” structure because the magnetic field of the Sun, from the solar wind, produces this protective enclosure for all of our solar system within it. The outer boundary of the heliosphere is called the heliosheath.

Page two talks more about the Local Fluff, and discusses in more detail the important discovery made by the Opher team.