C
CalliArcale
Guest
That's why I put it in quotes. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> There is a sort of "wind", but it's more a case of the solar system moving through the interstellar medium than the other way around. Scientists have predicted that there should be a bow shock somewhere in front of the heliosphere's leading side, and shortly before Voyager 1's camera failed altogether, they did manage to get a picture of what *might* be the bow shock -- basically, a faint glow. Nothing to look at, really, but there all the same. This is a product of what might, for want of a better phrase, be called the interstellar "wind".<br /><br />As an addendum to what I posted last night, scientists are trying to correlate data from Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Ulysses, Cassini, Galileo (historical data only, obviously), and SOHO. The heliosphere might grow and shrink in response to changes in the solar wind, so it should be possible to correlate changes in the various data sets. I don't recall all the details, but they did manage to correlate data from SOHO and Cassini to track a CME all the way out to Saturn. It's tough to crunch all of this data, but the hope is to find patterns that would show something like the heliopause growing when the Sun is more active. Of course, since we've got a grand total of one spacecraft in a good position to tell us anything about the heliopause, and even that one's mainly down to luck, it does limit the conclusions they can reach.<br /><br />But Voyager 2 is still moving. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> It'll get far enough out eventually. And next month, New Horizons will be launched; it's mission is to study Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, but it should still be working when it reaches the heliopause. Now that's cool! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>