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Before we go any further, this entire article has nothing to do with Marvel or the Marvel Superhero universe. Cool? Alright, here we go. Astrophysicists from Boston University’s NASA-funded SHIELD team (nope, not kidding… hence the disclaimer.) have made a massive discovery that could help unravel the mysteries of the Heliosphere, the protective bubble of magnetic energy that protects the solar system from the background radiation of the galaxy, the extra-solar cosmic rays, supernova radiation bursts and emissions from quasars and magnetars that could instantaneously roast the Earth and everything on it alive.
What’s so mysterious about it? Well, it turns out quite a bit. We don’t even know the size and shape of it. We know it surrounds the solar system, but we don’t know how far away or how consistent its borders are. BU astrophysicist Merav Opher who heads up the SHIELD team has made a critical discovery that could explain a lot to us.
SciTechDaily wrote,
“How is this relevant for society? The bubble that surrounds us, produced by the sun, offers protection from galactic cosmic rays, and the shape of it can affect how those rays get into the heliosphere,” says James Drake, an astrophysicist at University of Maryland who collaborates with Opher. “There’s lots of theories but, of course, the way that galactic cosmic rays can get in can be impacted by the structure of the heliosphere—does it have wrinkles and folds and that sort of thing?”
So What Is SHIELD? And What’s Their Big Discovery?
Okay, we’ve had enough fun with it. SHIELD at Boston University is the shorthand for an effort that Opher’s team calls “Solar-wind with Hydrogen Ion Exchange and Large-scale Dynamics”. (Somebody had to be a comic nerd on that team…) The group is based at the Center for Space Physics and Opher, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of astronomy, is leading the NASA DRIVE (Diversity, Realize, Integrate, Venture, Educate) Science Center that’s supported by $1.3 million in NASA funding. Seriously… the acronyms… oh the acronyms. The team with experts recruited from eleven other universities and research institutes have developed predictive models of the heliosphere to predict it’s size, scale and configuration. Check it out:
Nope, that isn’t a fetal organism or a multicellular life form, thats a three dimensional model of what the SHIELD team believes our Heliosphere looks like.
The team has asked the following questions:
- What is the over arching structure of the heliosphere?
- How do its ionized particles evolve and affect heliospheric processes?
- How does the heliosphere interact and influence the interstellar medium, the matter and radiation that exists between stars?
- How do cosmic rays get filtered by, or transported through, the heliosphere?
Each of these are fundamental to understanding the state of the heliosphere and ultimately the long term stability of our solar system and how it is affected by changes in interstellar space as well as interactions with other stellar phenomena.
“SHIELD combines theory, modeling, and observations to build comprehensive models,” Opher says. “All these different components work together to help understand the puzzles of the heliosphere.”
By studying “heliospheric jets—blooming columns of energy and matter that are similar to other types of cosmic jets found throughout the universe” Opher’s SHIELD team came to the conclusion that the interactions of Neutral hyrdrogen particles, which have equal amounts of positive and negative charge that net no charge at all could be the key to the unusual observed shape of the heliosphere.
“They come streaming through the solar system,” Opher says. Using a computational model like a recipe to test the effect of ‘neutrals’ on the shape of the heliosphere, she “took one ingredient out of the cake—the neutrals—and noticed that the jets coming from the sun, shaping the heliosphere, become super stable. When I put them back in, things start bending, the center axis starts wiggling, and that means that something inside the heliospheric jets is becoming very unstable.”
And that kids is apparently why instead of the heliosphere looking like an enormous ovoid or sphere or comet-like shape with a tail behind it… it looks like some variant of baked pastry. But then helio-crouissant or helio-bitten donut just doesn’t roll off the tongue so they’ll probably keep the existing name.
