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An artist's interpretation depicts the new view of the heliosphere in this image courtesy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and made available on June 9, 2011. Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles. While using a new computer model to analyze Voyager data, scientists found the sun's distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles approximately 100 million miles wide. The bubbles are created when magnetic field lines reorganize. The new model suggests the field lines are broken up into self-contained structures disconnected from the solar magnetic field. The findings are described in the June 9 edition of the Astrophysical Journal. The heliosheath is filled with "magnetic bubbles" (shown in the red pattern) that fill out the region ahead of the heliopause. [Photo/Agencies]
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