Goddard Glossary: Heliosphere

Narration: Meghan AmRhein

Transcript:

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Heliosphere.

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If you were to break down the word

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you’d have helio meaning Sun

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and sphere meaning, well spherical.

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The heliosphere is basically

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a big bubble created by the Sun

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that surrounds the planets in our solar system.

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Think of the Sun as a huge fan,

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except instead of normal wind,

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it’s blowing a mixture of charged particles

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away from the Sun, known as solar wind.

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And these can reach speeds of 300km/s to up to 700 km/s.

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The heliosphere is all the region

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affected by this solar wind.

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The outer boundary of the heliosphere

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is where the solar wind merges with

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the particles of deep space.

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The heliosphere is our neighborhood in space,

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and it’s also the habitat

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in which our solar system evolved,

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so studying the heliosphere

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allows us to understand

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what makes planets like Earth habitable,

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and what the rest of the universe might look like.