You are living in a bubble. Not a metaphorical bubble—a real, literal bubble.
You are living in a bubble. Not a metaphorical bubble—a real, literal bubble. But don’t worry, it’s not just you. The whole planet, and every other planet in the solar system, for that matter, is in the bubble too. And, we may just owe our very existence to it.
Space physicists call this bubble the heliosphere. It is a vast region, extending more than twice as far as Pluto, that casts a magnetic “force field” around all the planets, deflecting charged particles that would otherwise muscle into the solar system and even tear through your DNA, should you be unlucky enough to get in their way.
The heliosphere owes its existence to the interplay of charged particles flowing out of the sun (the so-called “solar wind”) and particles from outside the solar system. Though we think of the space between the stars as being perfectly empty, it is actually occupied by a thin broth of dust and gas from other stars—living stars, dead stars, and stars not yet born. Averaged across the whole galaxy, every sugar-cube-sized volume of space holds just a single atom, and the area around our solar system is even less dense.
Read more at Boston University
Image: Is this what the heliosphere looks like? New research suggests so. The size and shape of the magnetic “force field” that protects our solar system from deadly cosmic rays has long been debated by astrophysicists. Image courtesy of Opher, et. al
