How can astronomers pierce through the interstellar fog of the Milky Way—not to study distant objects, but to understand the fog itself? It just takes a little light. On January 12, 2003, NASA ...

In 2008, a spacecraft was launched by NASA to study how our heliosphere, the magnetic bubble surrounding our Sun and planets, interacts with interstellar space. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or ...

The Milky Way's interstellar medium—that is, the dust and gas that threads between our galaxy's billions of stars—is an abundant yet elusive material. That means the latest image from NASA's James ...

This suggests that the interstellar medium is constantly being stirred, not settling into just two categories. Further from the galactic plane, gas density drops off quickly with height, and warm gas ...

Voyager 1 is 14.1 billion miles from Earth. It is the furthest man-made object from our planet, and it moves farther and farther away from us and into interstellar space every day. And still, more ...

Molecules containing noble gases shouldn’t exist. By definition, these chemical elements — helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon — are the party poopers of the periodic table, huddling in the ...

An icy ‘Oumuamua may have lost enormous amounts of material during a journey lasting hundreds of millions of years between ...

In astronomy, the interstellar medium (ISM) is the matter and radiation that exist in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, as ...

During the next few years the Voyagers are expected to cross the termination shock, if Voyager 1 has not yet already done so (Krimigis et al., 2003), and make fundamental discoveries about the size of ...

This chapter summarizes the community’s basic understanding of the physics of the outer heliosphere, focusing on the influence exerted on the solar wind by the interstellar medium (Box 2.1). In ...