The heliosphere, or the giant field generated by the Sun's magnetic field surrounds all of the Solar System's planets. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab ...

This invisible boundary, located about 100 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun (one AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun ...

As the Solar System drifts through the Milky Way, it occasionally encounters regions of space capable of reshaping Earth’s environment. Millions of years ago, one such passage may have dramatically ...

Heliosphere protection As distant stars explode, they expel large amounts of radiation into interstellar space in the form of highly energized particles known as cosmic rays.

"The planet gets in the way from the point of view of any one spacecraft, so we had to spread them around the planet to look ...

What that shape is, however, scientists don’t yet know. The heliosphere’s shape may resemble that of a comet, with a long tail trailing a compact nose where the sun pushes into interstellar space.

On its way to the very edge of our heliosphere, known as the heliopause, the solar wind passes through distinct layers. The first of these is known as the termination shock.

The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

The heliosphere, and the neutral flow act as a giant magnetic compass for the galactic field. Future models should allow inference of its intensity. Consequences for Voyager 1 ...

The milestone makes the 41-year-old NASA probe just the second human-made object, after Voyager 1, to reach such distant regions. Now, Voyager 2 is over 11 billion miles from the sun — and counting.

Not many people know but we are about to exit our local interstellar cloud that this heliosphere has been ploughing through for the last 60,000 years. We're entering a completely new region." ...

The heliosphere's rounded shape causes this echo to reflect back in the form of a ring. But the key finding came from watching the ring as it expands.