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by Matthew Hart
� It turns out the Sun does kind of the same thing as the water falling from the faucet, only instead of flinging water outward, it flings solar wind in every direction, and instead of standing water around it, there's a particle soup made up of interstellar plasma. �
And while scientists have
known about this dynamic for years, they've now discovered, thanks
to the Voyager 2 space probe, that the region around the outer edge
of our "shield" made up of solar wind, which clashes with the
interstellar plasma soup, consists of an 89,000 �F (49,500 �C) wall
of (low density) plasma. �
describing the wall of plasma
around our solar system.
� In the above video, which comes via Digital Journal, Petrov discusses one of NASA's latest discoveries, made when its Voyager 2 space probe (launched in '77) began passing through a region surrounding our solar system known as the heliopause. �
In this region, Voyager 2
discovered the spherical wall of interstellar plasma, which Petrov
calls a "wall of fire."
That wall of hot plasma ranges in temperature from 30,000 to 50,000 �C (roughly 53,000 to 89,000 �F), according to a paper (Voyager 2 Plasma Observations of the Heliopause and Interstellar Medium) published earlier this month in the journal Nature Astronomy. � In the abstract for that paper, the authors say ,
The abstract also notes that,
Scientists have
discovered that the wall of hot plasma around our solar system is a
whopping 89,000 �F (49,500 �C). � where the heliopause interacts with interstellar plasma.
NASA/Walt Feimer
� which recorded the temperature of the wall of plasma.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
� Although it's unclear how the plasma wall will affect we biological beings. � Regardless, the discovery is exciting because, as JPL notes, this is the,
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