At the edge of our solar system, NASA’s Voyager 1 discovered a massive 90,000-degree wall of plasma shielding our world from the galaxy’s raw radiation.
As NASA’s Voyager 1 journeyed past the heliopause—the outer limit of the Sun’s influence—it encountered a startling phenomenon: a region of intensely heated plasma ranging from 30,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Rather than a solid barrier, this “wall” is a turbulent transition zone where solar winds collide with the pressure of interstellar space. Particles from our sun slow down and pile up, compressing into an invisible furnace that marks the definitive boundary where our solar neighborhood ends and the deep cosmos begins.
