There is a bubble around the Solar System.
The Sun's wind and radiation push out into space. The objects in the Solar System are protected from powerful cosmic radiation by a boundary of solar influence.
Understanding how the heliosphere works is an important part of understanding our Solar System and how we are able to be here.
How is this relevant to society? The shape of the Sun's bubble can affect how the sun's rays get into the heliosphere, according to James Drake of the University of Maryland.
The structure of the heliosphere can affect the way that galactic Cosmic rays can get in.
It's not easy to figure out the shape of the heliosphere since it's not visible. It's possible. The two Voyager probes and New Horizons have traveled to the far reaches of the Solar System, and are currently making their way through space.
Scientists determined last year that the heliosphere could be shaped like a weird cosmic croissant, thanks to the data from these probes. They have figured out that neutral hydrogen particles streaming into the Solar System from space likely play a crucial role in sculpting the heliosphere.
The team was going to investigate the jets. The material from the Sun's poles is shaped by the interaction of the solar magnetic field with the interstellar magnetic field. They curve around, like the points of a croissant, rather than shooting straight out. The Solar System has tails.
The jets are shown in a reconstruction of the heliosphere. M. Opher is an astronomer.
The Sun's jets are similar to other astrophysical jets in that they are unstable. The Sun's influence on the heliosphere appears to be unstable. The researchers wanted to know why.
"We see these jets projecting as irregular columns, and astrophysicists have been wondering for years why these shapes present instabilities," explains Merav Opher of Boston University, who led the research.
The team focused on neutral hydrogen atoms. We know that the Universe has a stream through it, but we don't know what effect it has on the heliosphere. The solar jets became stable when the neutral atoms were taken out of the model. They put them back.
"When I put them back in, the center axis starts wiggling, and that means that something inside the heliospheric jets is becoming very unstable," Opher says.
The team's analysis shows that the neutral hydrogen interacts with the ionized matter in the outer region of the heliosphere. The lighter fluid pushes into the heavier one when there is an interface between the two fluids. This causes large-scale turbulence in the tails of the heliosphere.
It's an elegant explanation for the shape of the heliosphere, and one that could have implications for our understanding of the way galactic cosmic rays enter the Solar System. This could help us understand the radiation environment of the Solar System outside of Earth's protective magnetic field and atmosphere.
The Universe is active. Our BU model doesn't try to cut out the chaos, which has allowed me to find the cause of the instability. pher says the neutral hydrogen particles.
This finding is a major breakthrough and it's set us in a direction of discovering why our model gets its distinct croissant-shaped heliosphere and why other models don't.
The research was published in a journal.
