I am always amazed when ever I read about the Voyager program, after all these years the two Voyager probes contunue to return useful dtata and help to refine our knowledge about our solar system and space in general.  A case in point is the confirmation from Voyager two that the solar system is in fact more or less egg shaped rather than perfectly rond.  While this had been assumed and accepted for a number of years now the confirmation elevates what was scientific supposition to scientific fact, and that is a big deal. Voyager proves solar system is 'squashed'.

     SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin, Voyager 1, into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars.

     However, Voyager 2 took a different path, entering this region, called the heliosheath, on Aug. 30, 2007. Because Voyager 2 crossed the heliosheath boundary, called the solar wind termination shock, about 16 billion kilometers (10 billion miles) away from Voyager 1 and almost 1.6 billion kilometers (a billion miles) closer to the sun, it confirmed that our solar system is "squashed" or "dented"- that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the solar wind is not perfectly round. Where Voyager 2 made its crossing, the bubble is pushed in closer to the sun by the local interstellar magnetic field.

     "Voyager 2 continues its journey of discovery, crossing the termination shock multiple times as it entered the outermost layer of the giant heliospheric bubble surrounding the sun and joined Voyager 1 in the last leg of the race to interstellar space," said Voyager Project Scientist Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. Results on the Voyager 2 shock crossing from the entire Voyager science team are being presented at the Fall 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Posted by: raging tachikoma at 08:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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