For a few short minutes, a NASA suborbital rocket has an ambitious plan to search for particles in interstellar space.
A mission called the Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamic Spectrometer (SHIELDS) will leave the range of White Sands missiles in New Mexico no earlier than Monday (April 19). It will rise to a peak height of about 300 kilometers – just over half the altitude International Space Station – and look at the sky for a few minutes with the telescope.
With this ability, it is possible to see light from particles in beyond our solar system even on a short flight out of Earth’s atmosphere. The mission is coming a similar study in 2014; this mission will extend 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 the surrounding regions. The planets, asteroids, gas, dust and everything else in our neighborhood are located in a group of gas clouds, called Local bubble. The bubble is about 300 light-years long and contains hundreds of stars, including our own sun.
Inside this structure, our solar system is enclosed in a magnetic bubble created by the sun known as the heliosphere. As the heliosphere moves through the local bubble at about 84,000 km / h, interstellar particles fall on the heliosphere “like rain on the windshield,” NASA he said in a statement.
“Our heliosphere looks more like a rubber raft than a wooden sailboat: its surroundings shape its shape,” NASA said in a statement. “Exactly how and where the lining of our heliosphere deforms gives us clues about the nature of interstellar space outside it.”
SHIELDS will examine the light from hydrogen atoms that came from 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 the lines of the magnetic field.
The mission will analyze what happens to the trajectory of the atoms as they slip through the heliopause. “The charged particles move around the heliopause, forming a barrier, [but] the neutral particles in interstellar space must pass through this glove, which alters their pathways, “NASA noted.
SHIELDS will look for light from these hydrogen atoms and measure how far the wavelength stretches or contracts, indicating how particles move through space. This information will allow investigators to find out the shape and density of matter around the heliopause barrier – providing some clues about interstellar space and the clouds inside it.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about the fine structure of the interstellar environment – our maps are a bit rough,” said Walt Harris, principal investigator for SHIELDS and a solar and heliosphere researcher at the University of Arizona, in the same NASA statement. “We know the general outlines of these clouds, but we don’t know what’s going on inside them.”
SHIELDS will likely provide scientists with information about the galaxy’s magnetic field and may allow astronomers to make some predictions about where our solar system will be in the distant future. Scientists project that our neighborhood will emerge from the local bubble over 50,000 years based on its current speed and trajectory, but as far as it is little understood. (It is far from the first time the Earth, nearby planets and stars have done this, but we have not been able to document the phenomenon in real time before).
The local observations gathered by SHIELDS will increase some data from the interstellar space itself. The Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, continues to send back observations of their interstellar space travel. In December, for example, the mission saw a a recently discovered kind of electron explosion which could provide more perspective on the burning stars.
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