termination shock

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termination shock

n.
An outer region of the solar system, about 8 billion miles (12.8 billion kilometers) from the Sun, where a standing shock wave is generated as the solar wind, encountering the interstellar medium, slows to subsonic speeds.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
As the solar wind slows to less than its sound speed, it forms a shock wave called the termination shock. 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.
Among specific topics are cosmic magnetic fields from torsion modes and massive photon inflation, the numerical treatment of dust diffusion in dusty proto-planetary disks, time-dependent processes in the sheath between the heliospheric termination shock and the heliopause, energetic particle transport with stochastic differential equations: general methods and the extension to anomalous diffusion regimes, building a numerical relativistic non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics code for astrophysical applications, and a new two-moment scheme with algebraic closure for energy-dependent multi-flavor neutrino transport in supernovae.
The space-craft passed the termination shock, where the solar wind slows down, in 2004.
Voyager 1 entered the heliospheric boundary region in 2004, passing beyond what's known as the termination shock where the solar wind abruptly slows.
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.
The signals reveal that at a distance of 83.7 astronomical units (1 AU is the average Earth-sun separation), Voyager 2 had at least five encounters with a turbulent region known as the termination shock, the researchers report in the July 3 Nature.
It wasn't until December 2004, when 94 astronomical units from the Sun (83/4 billion miles), that Voyager 1 passed through the termination shock, where the solar particle flow becomes subsonic, and made the first direct measurements of the heliosheath, a transition region between the shock and the interstellar gas.
21 Which space probe launched in 1977 do scientists believe is about to cross the solar wind's "termination shock", seven billion miles from the Sun?
Voyager 1 reached this shock wave, known as the termination shock, in 2004.
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