Of popular mechanics
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Astronomers have long sought to define the shape of our solar system.
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Researchers use lectures from various NASA missions to plot the contents of the solar system and, subsequently, its shape.
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New research shows that our solar system can actually be shaped like a deflated croissant or, depending on how you look at it, a jumbo shrimp.
Our sun emits powerful solar winds that revolve around the planets in our solar system like a giant bubble. This magnetic bubble, called the heliosphere, protects the planets from harmful cosmic radiation that jettisoned out in the nose of powerful cosmic events such as supernovae.
Scientists have long thought that the heliosphere can be shaped like a comet, with a distinctive, pointed “nose” and a long, sweeping tail. But according to new research published in the journal Natural Astronomy, that is not the case. The truth is much tastier.
You love our badass universe. We too. Let’s make the nerd out together.
After conducting a series of simulations with data from various NASA missions, a team of astronomers now believes that the heliosphere of our solar system can form as a “deflated croissant.” Personally, we see a jumbo shrimp.
Scientists recently determined the location of the center of the solar system, but defining its shape from within is a daunting task. To get an idea of the shape of the solar system, researchers must first identify all the materials in it. Of course we have planets and moons, asteroids and comets, small bacteria, and Steve Buscemi. But there are also a lot of other things in it.
Data of the boundary between the solar system and the rest of space – known as the heliopause – are muscle. Launched in 1977, the Voyager spacecraft reached the edge of the solar system only a few years ago. That brings the total in-situ point-of-solar-system data points to, well, two.
Fortunately, other missions provide useful clues that allow scientists to create a rough sketch of our bubble-like house.
NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission studies cosmic rays that reach Earth from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, as well as another type of particle called an energetically neutral atom, which is formed here in the solar system. They zipped around, stumbled into heliopause – a whopping 10 billion miles from Earth – and zoomed back to our planet. The Cassini mission, which ran Saturn and its many moons between 2004 and 2017, also had an instrument that studied these particles.
The New Horizons mission has been particularly helpful. As the spacecraft soars through the solar system – past Pluto, Charon and Arrokoth – it collects lectures on a special type of particle provided by solar winds called a pick-up ion. These Frankensteinian pick-up ions are way, heavier than other, much cooler charged particles found in solar wind because they are ionized in space.
“If you have some cold liquid and hot liquid, and you put them in space, they will not mix – they will usually evolve separately,” astronaut Merav Opher, of Boston University, said in a statement. “What we did was separate these two components of the solar wind and model the resulting 3D shape of the heliosphere.”
If we intend to venture further into the solar system, understanding its form will be critical. It could help us prepare our astronauts and their future living space for the onslaught of radiation they will have on the moon, Mars, and beyond.
You might as well go over
