PoliticalGroove Forums - View Single Post - MIT instrument finds surprises at solar system's edge

jowey · 12-11-2007, 06:14 PM

http://www.hypography.com/scienceart...tem's-edge

Quote:

The Voyager 2 spacecraft's Plasma Science instrument, developed at MIT in the 1970s, has turned up surprising revelations about the boundary zone that marks the edge of the sun's influence in space.

The unexpected findings emerged in the last few weeks as the spacecraft traversed the termination shockwave formed when the flow of particles constantly streaming out from the sun--the solar wind--slams into the surrounding thin gas that fills the space between stars.

The first surprise is that there is an unexpectedly strong magnetic field in that surrounding interstellar region, generated by currents in that incredibly tenuous gas. This magnetic field is squashing the bubble of outflowing gas from the sun, distorting it from the uniform spherical shape space physicists had expected to find.

A second surprise also emerged from Voyager 2's passage through the solar system's outer edge: Just outside that boundary the temperature, although hotter than inside, was ten times cooler than expected. Theorists had to scramble to come up with an explanation for the unanticipated chilling effect.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...htm?list762767
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast04oct_1.htm