Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Johns Hopkins Univ./C.M. Lisse et al.; Infrared: NASA/ESA/STIS; Optical: NSF/NoirLab/CTIO/DECaPS2; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
Astrosphere around a Young Sun
The Sun and our entire solar system are surrounded by a giant bubble called the heliosphere. The heliosphere is formed by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles, electrons and atomic nuclei which blows off the surface of the Sun at speed of about a million miles per hour. The heliosphere is currently about about a few hundred times the earth-sun distance, tens of billions of miles across. The boundary of the heliosphere defines the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space (a boundary that only the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft have crossed). Now, for the first time, scientists have seen the wind-blown bubble around a very young, sunlike star called HD 61005, only about 120 lightyears from our solar system. The image above shows an optical image from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory of the star field around HD 61005, which is the white dot near the center of the image. The inset shows a detailed view of HD 61005, showing infrared emission from the star (in blue and white) from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and X-ray emission (in purple and white) from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The infrared emission shows a swept-back disk of dust surrounding the star. The Chandra X-ray image shows emission from hot gas (at temperatures of millions of degrees) from the star itself, and from the hot gas inside the bubble blown by the star's stellar wind, which scientists call the "astrosphere", and which extends above and below the dust disk seen by Hubble. Since HD 61005 is only about 50 million years old (about one percent of the age of the Sun), exploring the astrophere around HD 61005 shows how the solar wind may have interacted with the local Galactic environment when the Sun, and our solar system, was very young.
Published: March 9, 2026
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 16-Mar-2026 11:35:19 EDT