The sun is the main attraction.
The Conversation was the original home of this story. The item was submitted by the publication to Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights on Space.com.
Sarah Spitzer works as a research fellow at the University of Michigan in the departments of climate and space sciences and engineering.
Because of the sun’s warmth, both humans and animals may live on Earth. However, it accomplishes far more than that, and it has an impact on a far wider range of space. The solar-influenced region of space, known as the heliosphere, is more than a hundred times bigger than the solar-Earth distance.
The solar wind, or highly charged ionized gas, is a continuous stream of plasma that the sun continuously releases. Apart from the continuous solar wind, the sun also periodically emits flares—bursts of light and energy—and coronal mass ejections, which are plasma eruptions that can contribute to the aurora.
Both the sun’s magnetic field and the plasma it emits spread into space. The local interstellar medium, which is made up of dust, neutral particles, and plasma that resides between stars and their individual astrospheres, is home to the heliosphere. Like myself, heliophysicists are interested in learning more about the heliosphere and its interactions with the interstellar medium.
The heliosphere is home to the solar system’s eight known planets, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper Belt, a group of cosmic objects that extends beyond Neptune and contains the planetoid Pluto. Because of the heliosphere’s immense size, objects in the Kuiper Belt circle around the sun rather than the heliosphere’s nearest border.
