The Universe And Your Solar System

Astronomy: I don’t understand this picture. What am I looking at?

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/NASA/photo//071211/photos_sc/2007_12_10t201557_450×322_us_space_voyager//s:/ap/20071211/ap_on_sc/solar_system_edge;_ylt=Ap6GATofIPvOWeLgtJ5gGCFxieAA

It is an artist’s rendering of the solar system. It is unfortunate that the Yahoo! article labels it a “Reuters photo,” although in fairness, NASA wasn’t specific on their website either. The 2 Voyagers are shown to illustrate that they will exit the heliopause (the blue spherical region) and enter the heliosheath (the elongated larger region) at two different spots. After the Voyager 1 craft exits the heliosheath in about 10 years (the other will take about 13 years), it will be outside the boundary of what is considered our solar system. The bright yellow is probably meant to indicate the interstellar magnetic field, but it is not clear from the article. The orbits of most of the planets around the sun are shown inside the blue sphere (heliopause). Here is a larger version of that image:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/images/v2_ts_image.jpg

Here is a link to the Voyager website:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

Here is a link to a movie that talks about it (in Quicktime format) that will make more sense:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/v_inter_cable.mov

Moon (USSR Missions) – Solar system in pictures