To the Edge Of The Solar System & Beyond

 

Space isn't empty.  It's full of radiation, interplanetary/stellar/galactic medium, microwaves from the very beginning of time and even impossible virtual particles popping in and out so fast we're not even sure they're there. Nothing gets across the scale of this stuff like the heliopause: the place where the solar system's "atmosphere" ends and true interstellar space begins.

NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer, not the mountain goat) has mapped the outer edges of the solar system over six months, collecting otherwise undetectable data to describe the edge of our neighborhood.  Of course the solar system doesn't really have an "atmosphere", but the "heliosphere" is the next best thing - the region where particles flowing out from the sun dominate over the interstellar medium.

These particles plow out into space, and the boundary where they're slowed to subsonic speeds by other material is called the "termination shock".  Which, astonishingly, is not yet the title of a counter-terrorism novel.  The next boundary is the heliosheath, the very limit for the sun's particles, at which point they lose all their initial outward momentum and are either turned back or become part of the interstellar medium.

It's the return trip that IBEX examines, capturing particles which went all the way to the edge of they system and back again - a round trip of over twenty four trillion meters.  Although we could have said "blurdy-blur miles" just now for all the sense such an insane scale makes to the human mind.  The neutral atoms returned by the solar system boundary (the result of charged particles combining with material already out there) paint a picture, and reveal a previously unknown high energy slash across the sheath.

Early theories (since no previous models could explain the high levels of emission observed) suggest that the line is oriented according to the galactic magnetic field - so just as a compass is oriented by the North pole, our entire planetary system is marked by an even vaster field.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/10/15/nasa.spacecraft.provides.first.view.our.place.galaxy

Comments

[Jojo]

Shouldn't this machine have been able to pick up traces of the mystical "dark matter/energy" that purportedly makes up so much of the universe?

[Jake]

Why would you think that Jojo? And dark matter/energy is really not mystical at all. It is just a name, a placeholder until something more specific can be identified. There are behaviors that physicists and astronomers cannot explain, and so dark matter/energy is a vague hypothesis used to to fill in the gap until further discoveries are made. The best example is that the observed rotation's of galaxies does not make sense based on observable matter present and the known constant of gravity. The amount of observable mass in most galaxies is not nearly enough to hold them together at the observed spin rate, so we know that something else must be present supplying additional gravitational force, or causing some further unknown effect. Scientists really just don't know much more then that, so they just call this unidentified stuff causing the observed effects "dark" matter or energy.

[Jojo]

Yes Jake, but it could also be that the whole theory that scientists are trying to extend via dark matter/energy is completely wrong and should be scrapped. That seems to make more sense to me than introducing a placeholder concept.

[Ivar Nielsen]

Quote:
"The next boundary is the heliosheath, the very limit for the sun's particles, at which point they lose all their initial outward momentum and are either turned back or become part of the interstellar medium", end of quote.

- And that´s why the Pioneer Spacecrafts and others are breaked up because of the decreasing Solar Wind and increasing interstellar Winds.

Ivar Nielsen
Natural Philosopher
www.native-science.net
www.cosmology-unified.net

[Ivar Nielsen]

@Jojo
I quite agree with your statement:

"Yes Jake, but it could also be that the whole theory that scientists are trying to extend via dark matter/energy is completely wrong and should be scrapped".

- In my explanation above on the Pioneer Spacecrafts, the whole gravity thing is just a matter of looking at gravity as "creative opposite forces" that interacts eternally in the Universe, folding everything in and out.

Ivar Nielsen
Natural Philosopher
www.cosmology-unified.net
nielsen.ivar@gmail.com