Topic: Voyager to Earth - The heliosphere is irregular.

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

Voyager 2 could pass beyond the outermost layer of our solar system, called the "termination shock," sometime within the next year, NASA scientists announced at a media teleconference today.

The milestone, which comes about a year after Voyager 1's crossing, comes earlier than expected and suggests to scientists that the edge of the shock is about one billion miles closer to the Sun in the southern region of the solar system than in the north.

This implies that the heliosphere, a spherical bubble of charged low-energy particles created by our Sun's solar wind, is irregularly shaped, bulging in the northern hemisphere and pressed inward in the south.

[Bonk]

Typical assumption of astronomers. What makes them think its shape is static? I highly doubt that it is. I really have to wonder sometimes. I dropped an astronomy course once three weeks into it because I just could not swallow the many logically flawed assumptions.

[E_Look]

In all fairness, space is big, full of unknown stuff, we're far away from it, and have no way to actually get there.

I understand exactly what you mean (and agree with you) by flawed logical conclusions (as in biology... or worse, psychology), but with astronomy and astrophysics, they have only enough tools and resources to tantalize our curiosity and imaginations... so close yet so far.

I wish they would be just a little more conservative on the guesswork, especially as it touches upon cosmology.

[Nemesis]

I would have to say that astronomers describe what they can see and make the best guesses on what they can't see.  Over time as technology progresses they get to see more and find out how well their guesses stand up to the new discoveries and how right Sir Arthur Eddington was.  (Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.)

[E_Look]

Heh.  After everything settles down, they just might find that space is rectilinear. 

[Commander Maxillius]

Well, I would think that sending two tiny probes in the same general direction would be a horribly small sampling of data to determine if the entire heliosphere is shaped oddly of is Voyager 2's instruments are fubared after being in space 30 years.