Voyager 2 Set to Reach Termination Shock

w1z4rd

w1z4rd

Karmic Sangoma
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Just to give you a quick idea what the termination shock is... basically our whole solar system is inside this giant "explosion" cause by the sun. The sun radiates solar winds in all directions to form this giant sphere known as the heliosphere. Our planet is protected from this blast by our magnetosphere which forms and eltromagnetic barrier around our earth to protect out atmosphere from being blasted off by the solar winds.

The termination shock is when the mass of the interstellar medium (as space is not a vacuum) has enough power to stop the solar winds. These solar winds drop from highspeed to sub sonic at the termination shock.

"A computer model simulation developed at UC Riverside has predicted that in late 2007 to early 2008, the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the termination shock, the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. At the termination shock, located at 7-8.5 billion miles from the sun, the solar wind is decelerated to less than the speed of sound. The boundary of the termination shock is not fixed, however, but wobbly, fluctuating in both time and distance from the sun, depending on solar activity. Because of this fluctuation, the spacecraft is also predicted to cross the boundary again in middle 2008. The article abstract is available from The Astrophysical Journal."
Click to expand...

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/28/1549207
 
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