Is our solar system shaped like a deflated croissant?
By Mike Wall - Space.com Senior Writer 2 days ago
Most scientists thought it would be comet-shaped.
An updated model suggests the shape of the sun’s bubble of influence, the heliosphere (seen in
yellow), may be a deflated croissant shape, rather than the long-tailed comet shape suggested
by other research.
(Image: © Opher et al.)
Our solar system's protective bubble may not be comet-shaped after all.
Scientists have traditionally posited that the heliosphere, the huge bubble of charged particles that the sun blows around itself, has a rounded leading edge, where the solar system barrels through space, with a long tail streaming behind it. But the heliosphere's true shape is weirder and more complex, a recent study suggests — something akin to a deflated croissant.
It's tough to map out the heliosphere, because its closest edge is still a whopping 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) from Earth. Just two spacecraft, NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, have directly sampled the boundary, and two data points are far from sufficient to outline the heliosphere's contours.
So scientists have done so by other means. For example, they've studied measurements of galactic cosmic rays, super-energetic charged particles that zoom into our neighborhood from very far away. Researchers have also carefully tracked "energetic neutral atoms" that bounced sunward after interacting with the interstellar medium, the vast cosmic sea that lies beyond the heliosphere.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/solar-system-shaped-like-croissant.html
