Local Fluff shouldn't exist, but we know why now!

mrk

mrk

mrk

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NASA said:
December 23, 2009: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

see caption"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all."

Right: Voyager flies through the outer bounds of the heliosphere en route to interstellar space. A strong magnetic field reported by Opher et al in the Dec. 24, 2009, issue of Nature is delineated in yellow. Image copyright 2009, The American Museum of Natural History. [larger image]

The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
Click to expand...

[Full article @ Source]

So in short our Atmosphere protects us from the Sun's solar winds while the Sun's solar winds protects our solar system from the reach of the Local Fluff but in several tens of thousands of years the compression will bring the outer solar system closer and interesting things could happen here!

Also, what protects local fluff on the other side, in Interstellar space?! :cool:

Amazing how the Voyager probes have been zooming away from us safely in space for the past 30years too without being hit by space debris and destroyed.
 
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