The Heliosphere in Time
arXiv:0810.0441 · doi:10.1007/s11214-008-9448-7
Abstract
Because of the dynamic nature of the interstellar medium, the Sun should have encountered a variety of different interstellar environments in its lifetime. As the solar wind interacts with the surrounding interstellar medium to form a heliosphere, different heliosphere shapes, sizes, and particle contents result from the different environments. Some of the large possible interstellar parameter space (density, velocity, temperature) is explored here with the help of global heliosphere models, and the features in the resulting heliospheres are compared and discussed. The heliospheric size, expressed as distance of the nose of the heliopause to the Sun, is set by the solar wind - interstellar pressure balance, even for extreme cases. Other heliospheric boundary locations and neutral particle results correlate with the interstellar parameters as well. If the H0 clouds identified in the Millennium Arecibo survey are typical of clouds encountered by the Sun, then the Sun spends ~99.4% of the time in warm low density ISM, where the typical upwind heliosphere radii are up to two orders of magnitude larger than at present.
arXiv comment12 pages; to appear in Space Science Reviews, "From the Outer Heliosphere to the Local Bubble", J. Linsky et al. (eds); ISSI workshop held Oct. 2007
References in corpus (6)
- Local stellar kinematics from Hipparcos data
- New Mass Loss Measurements from Astrospheric Lyman-alpha Absorption
- The Millennium Arecibo 21-cm Absorption Line Survey. IV. Statistics of Magnetic Field, Column Density, and Turbulence
- The Ionization of Nearby Interstellar Gas
- Heliospheric Response to Different Possible Interstellar Environments
- The Sun's Journey Through the Local Interstellar Medium: The PaleoLISM and Paleoheliosphere