The Discovery of our Dented Solar System

The sun lies at the centre of our solar system, and from it emanates light and heat energy in all directions. It pushes out this energy and before it creates the solar wind, which expands outward and envelopes the planets, creating what is known as the heliosphere. As the sun pushes this solar wind out in all directions, it has long been assumed that the heliosphere - and thus the solar system - was shaped like a bubble. The recent efforts of the Voyager II spacecraft, however, discovered that this is not the case.

Voyager II is headed for interstellar space, which scientists estimate it will reach in the next seven to ten years (and has the juice to keep running until 2020.) On the way Voyager II has been observing our solar system and sending those observations back to planet earth for us to devour, and one of the last reports we received tells us that our solar system is not a perfect bubble shape, but rather…dented.

Southern Dent

A dimple of sorts has been observed by Voyager II as it made five crossings of a region of space referred to as the "termination shock." The termination shock is the place where the heliosphere bumps up against the thin gas that lives in the spaces between galaxies. The solar winds slow down as they reach the termination shock and get push back from the interstellar gas, but there was no reason to imagine that this push back would form anything other than an equal sphere; until now.

The dent was discovered in the southern hemisphere of the heliosphere, where Voyager II made shock crossings. It is believed that the dent in the shape of the solar system is due to the influence of local magnetic field energy from deep space. This was not the only discovery made; it also turns out that the temperature of the regions is quite a bit cooler than scientists imagined it would be.

Cool South Pole

When the data came back from Voyager on local temperatures scientists were expecting to see a reading of 555,500 C, but instead it turns out the regions is much lower, at around 111,100 C. This is just one bit of data that scientists are eager to see, as Voyager I, which passed within a billion miles of the same regions of space, had an equipment failure on devices designed to measure the solar wind. Voyager I also only made one crossing of the termination shock compared to five for Voyager II. Each Voyager headed for a different region of the heliosphere, the first taking the north and the second the south.

Final Thoughts

Does the denting of the solar system have any real impact on life here on Earth? While it seems unlikely, the nature of scientific discovery tells us that we won't know for some time. The further out from home base that we get with our scientific wanderings, the smaller the chance that discoveries have relevance to the average citizen. However the sum of what we don't understand about the universe vastly outnumbers the sum of what we do, so any and all information has value in the quest to even out that knowledge.

Related Articles in the 'Our Solar System' Category...

• A Guide To The Outer Solar System
• How Planetary Surfaces Are Formed
• Observing Dark Matter And The Lifespan Of The Universe
• Orbits and How They Work
• Origins of the Solar System
• Planetary Atmospheres
• The Asteroid Belt
• The Dwarf Planets
• The Gas Giant Planets
• The Kuiper
• The Rocky Planets