Strangeness at the Boundary of Interstellar Space

Voyager 2 passes into interstellar space in this artist’s illustration.          NASA

NASA has found something weird and unexplained in the boundary between the Sun and interstellar space. On November 5, 2018, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft crossed into interstellar space, some six years after its twin, Voyager 1, made the same transition. There, it found something new and puzzling that its predecessor had missed.

“There appear to be cosmic ray boundary layers on both sides of the heliopause, with the outer one only being evident at the position of Voyager 2,” says Edward Stone, a professor of physics at Caltech and project scientist on the Voyager program since its inception in the 1970s. “This cosmic ray boundary layer on the outside of the heliopause was not evident at the place and time where Voyager 1 crossed it.”

See full article in VICE.