For a few minutes, a suborbital rocket from NASA has an ambitious plan to search for particles interstellar space.
A mission called Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamics Spectrometer (SHIELDS) will not take off from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico until Monday (April 19). It will rise to a peak altitude of about 300 kilometers – a little more than half the height of the land International Space Station – and peeks into the air for a few minutes with his telescope.
With this capability it is possible to emit light from particles outside our solar system even on a short flight outside the earth’s atmosphere. The mission follows a similar study in 2014; this mission will expand the scope of the project.
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To understand what SHIELDS is looking for, it’s best to start with a quick overview of our solar system structure and nearby regions. The planets, asteroids, gas, dust and all the others in our environment are located in a group of gas clouds, called the Local bubble. The bubble is about 300 light-years long and contains hundreds of stars, including our own sun.
Within this structure, our solar system is enveloped by a magnetic bubble created by the sun, known as the heliosphere. As the heliosphere travels through the Local Bubble at about 52,000 km / h (84,000 km / h), particles fall from interstellar space onto the heliosphere “like rain against a windshield”, NASA said in a release.
“Our heliosphere is more like a rubber raft than a wooden sailboat: its environment shapes its shape,” NASA continued in its release. “Exactly how and where our heliosphere’s liner deforms gives us clues about the nature of interstellar space beyond.”
SHIELDS will light from hydrogen atoms that originated in interstellar space. These atoms have equal balances of fundamental particles called protons (positive charge) and electrons (negative charge). Since the positive and negative charges balance each other, the interstellar hydrogen atoms have a neutral electric charge that enables them to cross magnetic field lines.
The mission will look at what happens to the orbits of the atoms as they crawl into the heliopause. “Charged particles flow around the heliopause and form a barrier, [but] “Neutral particles from interstellar space must pass through this glove, which changes their paths,” NASA noted.
SHIELDS will seek the light of these hydrogen atoms and measure how far the wavelength extends or contracts, indicating how the particles move through space. With this information, investigators can figure out the shape and density of matter around the heliopause barrier, giving more clues about the interstellar space and the clouds in it.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about the fine structure of the interstellar medium – our maps are kind of rough,” Walt Harris, lead researcher at SHIELDS and a solar and helioferical researcher at the University of Arizona, said in the same NASA release. “We know the general outlines of these clouds, but we do not know what happens in them.”
SHIELDS is also likely to provide scientists with insight into the magnetic field of the galaxy, and perhaps astronomers will be able to make predictions about where our solar system will be in the distant future. Scientists plan to move our environment out of the Local Bubble over 50,000 years based on current speeds and trajectories, but where is it poorly understood. (This is by no means the first time that the earth, the planets and stars in the environment have done this, but we have not yet been able to document the real time of the phenomenon.)
The local observations collected by SHIELDS will supplement some data from the interstellar space itself. Launched in 1977, the twin spacecraft Voyager continues to send observations about their journey through interstellar space. In December, for example, the mission noted that a newfound type of electron burst which can give more insights into flickering stars.
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