For a few short minutes, a NASA suborbital rocket has an ambitious plan to detect particles interstellar space.
A mission called Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamics Spectrometer (SHIELDS) will take off from New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range no earlier than Monday (April 19). slightly more than half the height of the International Space Station – and stare at the sky for a few minutes with his telescope.
With this capability it is possible to see light from particles outside of our solar system even during a short flight outside the Earth’s atmosphere. The mission follows a similar study in 2014; this mission broadens the scope of the project.
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To understand what SHIELDS is looking for, it is best to start with a quick overview of the structure of our solar system and nearby regions. The planets, asteroids, gas, dust and everything else in our environment are in a cluster of gas clouds called Local bubble. The bubble is about 300 light years long and includes hundreds of stars, including our own sun.
Within this structure, our solar system is encapsulated in a magnetic bubble created by the sun known as the heliosphere. As the heliosphere moves through the Local Bubble at about 52,000 mph (84,000 km / h), particles from interstellar space fall on the heliosphere “like rain against a windshield,” NASA said in a release.
“Our heliosphere is more of a rubber raft than a wooden sailboat: its environment shapes its shape,” NASA continued in the release. “Exactly how and where the lining of our heliosphere deforms gives us clues as to the nature of the interstellar space beyond.”
SHIELDS will investigate lightly hydrogen atoms that originated in interstellar space. These atoms have equal balances of fundamental particles called protons (positive charge) and electrons (negative charge). Because the positive and negative charges balance each other, the interstellar hydrogen atoms have a neutral electric charge, which allows them to cross magnetic field lines.
The mission will look at what happens to the trajectories of the atoms as they creep into heliopause. Charged particles flow around the heliopause and form a barrier, [but] neutral particles from interstellar space have to pass through this glove, which changes their path, ”noted NASA.
SHIELDS will look for the light from these hydrogen atoms and measure how far the wavelength stretches or contracts, indicating how the particles move through space. With this information, researchers can determine the shape and matter density around the heliopause barrier – providing more clues about interstellar space and the clouds within it.
“There is a lot of uncertainty about the fine structure of the interstellar medium – our maps are rather crude,” said Walt Harris, SHIELDS principal investigator and a solar and heliospheric researcher at the University of Arizona, in the same NASA release. “We know the general outline of these clouds, but we don’t know what’s going on inside.”
SHIELDS is also likely to give scientists insights into the galaxy’s magnetic field, and perhaps astronomers can make predictions about where our solar system will be in the distant future. Scientists predict that our neighborhood will disappear from the Local Bubble within 50,000 years based on its current speed and trajectory, but where is poorly understood. (It’s far from the first time Earth, planets, and nearby stars have done this, but we haven’t been able to document the phenomenon in real time before.)
The local observations SHIELDS collects will supplement some data from interstellar space itself. Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager spacecraft continues to return observations of their journey through interstellar space. For example, in December, the mission saw a newly found kind of electron burst that could provide more insight into flickering stars.
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