Lowdown on the sun

Uncategorized September 24, 2008

There’s an interesting article on the solar wind on Science News today. For those of you too young to remember (and, ahem, those of us old enough to start having trouble remembering), the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched back in the 1970s are still plugging away returning interesting data on the nature of the solar wind from way past Pluto. This article mentions them, but is mostly based on data from the Ulysses spacecraft which is in a polar orbit around the sun.

1 thought on “Lowdown on the sun”

  1. I’ve recently discovered

    I’ve recently discovered that Science News makes much of its information publicly available, but access to older stories requires an account and subscription. As a consequence, the link to the original story may not be accessible to you.

    The main point of the story was that the current extended, and unusually low, solar minimum means that the Voyager spacecraft may reach the interstellar boundary, the point where the solar wind ceases to dominate over the interstellar medium, a year or two earlier than expected. This boundary is sort like what happens when a stream flows into a lake; there is a turbulent region where the two mix and the stream ceases to exist as a distinct entity shortly after that point. Of course, it’s not really a sharp boundary, more of an extended region which is part of why we’re interested in it, not just where it is, but what happens there.

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