For two decades now, the iconic twin Voyager spacecraft have been quietly overturning everything we thought we knew about the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space
For all of humanity’s millennia of staring at the stars and decades of launching probes to explore our universe, only two spacecraft carrying working instruments have ever managed to escape thelaunched in 1977 on an epic tour of the outer planets; both swung past Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 added Uranus and Neptune to the itinerary. The two spacecraft have trekked ever outward since, and several of their instruments have continued observations despite the challenges of.
“You see these dramatic 11-year bumps, mins and maxes, dips and peaks throughout the whole entire heliosphere,” says Jamie Rankin, a space physicist at Princeton University and deputy project scientist of the Voyager mission. And, she notes, astronomers of all stripes are trapped within that chaotic background in ways that may or may not affect their data and interpretations.
What that shape actually is, however, scientists don’t yet know. The heliosphere’s shape may resemble that of a comet, with a long tail trailing a compact nose where the sun pushes into interstellar space. Or perhaps the interplay between the sun’s magnetic field and the interstellar medium molds the bubble into a croissantlike shape, with two lobes trailing our star.
But the goldfish weren’t sitting idly by. In 2008 NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer , which orbits Earth and samples particles, called energetic neutral atoms, that stream in from the edge of the heliosphere. Scientists can use IBEX measurements of these particles’ characteristics to reconstruct some of what’s happening far out there, billions of miles away.
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