Heliosphere
node
The bubble the solar wind blows in the interstellar medium, and the only structure that can honestly be called the Sun's domain. It is not bounded by gravity — the Sun's gravitational reach extends thousands of times further — but by pressure: the heliosphere ends where the outward push of the thinning solar wind can no longer hold back the plasma, magnetic field and cosmic rays of the surrounding Galaxy. It has internal structure that the Voyagers mapped by flying through it: supersonic wind out to the termination shock, then a thick, turbulent, subsonic heliosheath, then the heliopause itself. Because the Sun moves through the interstellar medium, the bubble is not spherical, and the two Voyagers crossed its boundary at different distances on different trajectories, which is part of how its shape is being reconstructed. Not a place.
A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.
Read in · 1
Evidence · 3
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 2
- Very local interstellar mediumadjacent_to
- Solar windcreated_by
Assembled narrative · 1
An assembled narrative is available for this object.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
Actions
/atlas?object=PHENOMENON_HELIOSPHERE