3 ms·
Orbit means going very fast around something in a circular motion. These particles are heading directly streaming out from the sun, not going round it. As I un
by grey-area 3y ago
Orbit means going very fast around something in a circular motion. These particles are heading directly streaming out from the sun, not going round it.
As I understand it it’s where these particles reach equilibrium with the stellar medium. The sun is like a comet at a large enough scale, with a long tail of particles as it moves through the galaxy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
- lazide 3y agoThe particles don’t meaningfully interact, they aren’t dense enough.
- adwn 3y agoThey interact via the electromagnetic force.
- pdonis 3y agoThey are plenty dense enough to interact given that it's plasma.
- lazide 3y agoYou might want to re-read that graph. And conservation of momentum means the particles leaving the sun don’t stop rotating when they leave the sun - the sun is rotating.
- pdonis 3y ago> You might want to re-read that graph. You might want to re-read the Wikipedia page. It explicitly says that Voyager 1 saw the density of plasma around it increase by a factor of 40 as it crossed the heliopause. (For Voyager 2, it was a factor of 20, as I have posted elsewhere in this discussion.) It also explicitly says that the solar wind is stopped at the heliopause due to the pressure of the interstellar medium, which, last I checked, means the interstellar medium is interacting with the solar wind. > conservation of momentum means the particles leaving the sun don’t stop rotating when they leave the sun - the sun is rotating Sure, with a period of about 27 days. Go do the math and compare the tangential velocity that equates to with the tangential velocity required to orbit the Sun just above the Sun's surface.