BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.

Subject: RE: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: Donuel
Date: 13 May 21 - 09:19 AM

I can picture the sun orbiting slightly above and below a plane of the galaxy but when I see two closely orbiting planets like Mars and Earth around the sun I see the tracing of a double helix. The edges of the solar system have bubbles of twisted magnetic fields that insulate us from some of the nastiest energetic light.

Subject: RE: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 12 May 21 - 02:19 PM

In one of those weird coincidences I came across the word heliopause for the firt time today - Here. Then it cropped up again in an article that caught my eye about the space probe "Voyager" -

"There are multiple ways to think about the “edge of the solar system.” One is a boundary region called the heliopause. That’s the frontier where the solar wind (the soup of charged particles continually thrown off by the sun) is too weak to hold off the interstellar medium—the plasma, dust, and radiation that fill the bulk of space."

Well I never :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 12 May 21 - 01:54 PM

Also the alignment that allowed the Voyager missions to happen occur once every 176 years, and we were lucky that they aligned on the side of the sun where it happened otherwise they wouldn't have crossed the heliopause in our lifetimes.

Subject: RE: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 12 May 21 - 01:48 PM

That's what I gather - the mass and direction of travel of the sun through the galaxy making a solar wind bow wave.

Subject: RE: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 12 May 21 - 05:47 AM

I almost certainly don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't it something about the whole solar system acting something like a huge comet as it moves in one direction through the galaxy? A little bit in front but a lot behind... Something about the solar wind being stopped at the front edge by the interstellar medium, which is something to do with pressure from the solar winds of nearby stars...

Back to me 'ole!

Subject: RE: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 12 May 21 - 05:44 AM

Apparently the answer to my own question is that the ISM is directional rather than uniform.

Subject: BS: Graphical representation of heliopause.
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 12 May 21 - 05:13 AM

Why is it that every graphical representation of the edge of the solar system shows the heliopause as a parabola only on one side of the sun. Surely in reality it would largely be globular?

Another interesting question is whether it is oblate spheroid.

Have our astronomer detected anything similar on the edge of inter-galactic space?