Nasa scientists believe they have found new evidence of the mysterious ‘wall’ that surrounds all the planets and objects in our solar system.
This mysterious bubble marks the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space and provides a marker for the edge of the sun’s influence.
According to the latest findings, the barrier is actually a vast amount of trapped hydrogen atoms caught up in the solar wind of our star.
These produce waves of ultraviolet light in a very distinctive way, which have been detected by the sensors aboard the New Horizons interplanetary space probe.
Nasa scientists believe they have found new evidence of a mysterious ‘wall’ surrounding our solar system. This mysterious bubble marks the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space and provides a mark for where the Sun’s influence wanes
Astronomers first glimpsed the phenomenon around 30 years ago, when faint signs were detected by both Voyager probes.
However, evidence supporting the theory of a heliosphere has remained murky in the intervening yeas.
Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft, which passed Pluto in 2015, has been using its on-board detector, known as ‘Alice’, to look for traces of the celestial interaction.
‘We’re seeing the threshold between being in the solar neighbourhood and being in the galaxy,’ astronomer Leslie Young of the Southwest Research Institute and New Horizons team told Science News.
New Horizons is the first spacecraft with the capability to verify Voyager’s observations. It has scanned the ultraviolet sky seven times between 2007 to 2017.
According to the measurements taken by all three spacecrafts, the three decade old theory about the heliosphere appears to still hold true.
In the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Nasa scientists wrote: ‘Long‐term observations made with the Alice instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft confirm measurements made 30 thirty years earlier with the Voyager spacecraft.
‘Both sets of data are best explained if the observed ultraviolet light is not only a result of the scattering of sunlight by hydrogen atoms within the solar system but includes a substantial contribution from a distant source.
‘This distant source could be the signature of a “wall” of hydrogen, formed near where the interstellar wind encounters the solar wind or could be more distant.
‘Similar future observations from New Horizons are planned about twice each year.’
The latest findings confirm theories that there is more UV light beyond the theorised location of the wall surrounding our solar system.
‘It’s really exciting if these data are able to distinguish the hydrogen wall,’ said space scientist David McComas of Princeton University, who was not involved in the research.
New Horizons is expected to jet past Ultima Thule – the most distant object within the solar system, on New Years Day 2019.
It will then continue to look for the wall about twice a year until the mission reaches its conclusion, which is expected to be around 10-15 years from now, says Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
If the levels of UV light detected ever take a nosedive, the researchers say this could prove the craft has left the wall in its wake, much like Voyager 1 did in 2013.