Now, as Voyager 2 punches the
heliosheath to join Voyager 1 in interstellar space, these hoary spacecraft are nearing the end of their scientific lifetimes.
Eventually, it reaches pressure balance with the local interstellar medium at a boundary called the heliopause; the transition region between these boundaries is called the inner
heliosheath. The region beyond the heliopause, where the interstellar medium is affected by the presence of the heliosphere, is called the outer
heliosheath.
"Instead of a prolonged, comet-like tail, this rough bubble-shape of the heliosphere is due to the strong interstellar magnetic field-much stronger than what was anticipated in the past-combined with the fact that the ratio between particle pressure and magnetic pressure inside the
heliosheath is high," said Kostas Dialynas, a space scientist at the Academy of Athens in Greece and lead author on the study.
2012 - Our Voyager 2 probe enters the "
heliosheath"— the outermost layer of the heliosphere.
Voyager II is past what we used to think of as the solar system, but it is still in the
heliosheath, approaching the (theoretical) edge of the Oort cloud.
It has spent recent years studying the
heliosheath, which surrounds the outer edge of the solar system, where the sun's influence wanes.
(138) The
heliosheath is a bubble of charged particles where the Sun's solar wind that meets the solar wind from interstellar space that forms a bubble of charged particles at the edge of our solar system.
(2012) No meridional plasma flow in the
heliosheath transition region.
Since December 2004 when Voyager 1 crossed a point in space called the termination shock, the spacecraft has been exploring the heliosphere's outer layer, called the
heliosheath. In this region, the stream of charged particles from the Sun known as the solar wind abruptly slowed down from supersonic speeds and became turbulent.