The wind speed of a devastating Category 5 hurricane can top over 150 miles per hour (241km/hour.) Now imagine another kind of wind with an average speed of 0.87 million miles per hour (1.4 million km/hour.) Welcome to the wind that begins in our sun and doesn’t stop until after it reaches the edge of the heliosphere: the solar wind. Source:…
Tag: heliosphere
Voyager 2 illuminates boundary of interstellar space
One year ago, on Nov. 5, 2018, NASA’s Voyager 2 became only the second spacecraft in history to leave the heliosphere—the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our Sun. At a distance of about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth—well beyond the orbit of Pluto—Voyager 2 had entered interstellar space, or the region between stars. Today,…
Voyager 2 sends back insights on interstellar space
Voyager 2 left the realm of the sun’s influence a year ago today, becoming the 2nd craft ever to do so. This week, the journal Nature Astronomy published 5 new papers describing what Voyager 2 has been seeing on its journey into the unknown. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/voyager-2-new-published-papers-boundary-interstellar-space…