Selparis

It was sort of a romantic notion, I guess: the idea that, as the solar system moves through the interstellar medium, the interaction between the outward flowing solar wind and the medium creates shockwave. Makes us seem like a missile traveling through space. At least, it makes for a pretty picture, as these examples around other stars shows:

Heliosheath (Courtesy NASA)

Heliosheath 2 (Courtesy NASA)

Well, no such luck. It turns out our velocity vector isn’t in quite the right direction and its magnitude with respect to the interstellar medium isn’t great enough to produce a bow shock. Sucks, doesn’t it? I mean, we knew our Sun was pretty average as far as stars come, but give it a bow shock and, I don’t know, it sort of adds character. Now, we’re just back to being boring. Alien astronomers probably don’t even give our Sun a second look. And this was what was responsible for bursting our bubble:

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