Re:Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
by sanderjd on Friday December 15, 2023 @01:09PM
(#38656815)
Interesting! What is the interstellar medium? Is it entirely the combined stellar winds of all the other stars, or are there other components?
My initial intuition was to wonder why the vectors of all the other stellar winds wouldn't be expected to nearly cancel each other out, but then it seems like the ones that would be pushing in the same direction as the sun's would have been blocked on the other side of the sphere, so it does seem to make sense that the net direction would be to point inward. But then I realized that I have no idea if any of that reflects an accurate mental model of what's going on :)
My initial intuition was to wonder why the vectors of all the other stellar winds wouldn't be expected to nearly cancel each other out, but then it seems like the ones that would be pushing in the same direction as the sun's would have been blocked on the other side of the sphere, so it does seem to make sense that the net direction would be to point inward. But then I realized that I have no idea if any of that reflects an accurate mental model of what's going on :)