reply to post by stanguilles7
Not proving you wrong, but rather the initial poster whom you are referring:
The Local Interstellar Cloud (or Local Fluff) is the interstellar cloud roughly 30 light years across through which the Earth's solar system is
currently moving. The Solar System is thought to have entered the Local Interstellar Cloud at some time between 44,000 and 150,000 years ago and is
expected to remain within it for another 10,000 to 20,000 years.
The dreaded
Wikipedia
Here's an article from Nasa:
December 23, 2009: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature,
a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.
"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA
Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing
puzzle of how it can exist at all."
Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery
This is what people are making a big deal about as far as the "hot magnetic cloud," specifically this portion of the article:
Astronomers call the cloud we're running into now the Local Interstellar Cloud or "Local Fluff" for short. It's about 30 light years wide and
contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C.
Now that's about at hot as the surface of the sun, but the cloud is
extremely diffuse and is held at bay by the heliopause. In fact it is the
combination of pressure of this cloud and the solar wind which creates the heliosphere in the first place.
The following excerpt is where people are getting the notion that the cloud is going to have an effect on the climate:
The fact that the Fluff is strongly magnetized means that other clouds in the galactic neighborhood could be, too. Eventually, the solar system
will run into some of them, and their strong magnetic fields could compress the heliosphere even more than it is compressed now. Additional
compression could allow more cosmic rays to reach the inner solar system, possibly affecting terrestrial climate and the ability of astronauts to
travel safely through space.
However, what people also fail to realize is the time scale that are discussed:
These events would play out on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, which is how long it takes for the solar system to move
from one cloud to the next.
That's tens of thousand of years in case anyone wants to jump to the conclusion that they are talking about tens of years...
A more recent paper on the topic shows, however:
Together, the Möbius et al. (2012) and Bzowski et al. (2012) results provide a new interstellar flow direction and a significantly lower velocity
of the incoming gas and therefore significantly lower dynamic pressure on the heliosphere, which translates into a heliospheric interaction that is
even less dominated by the external dynamic pressure and clearly lies squarely in the middle ground of astrospheres dominated by the external magnetic
and dynamic pressures (McComas et al. 2009b).
EDITORIAL: INTERSTELLAR BOUNDARY EXPLORER (IBEX): DIRECT SAMPLING OF THE INTERSTELLAR
MEDIUM
I note also that the poster has not answered my request for a link to any site which references
52,000 years ago the earths north pole was in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
in any form or fashion.
At least he has not when I began this post, which did take me a while to craft as I like to have links to what I am referring to included.
edit on 15-4-2012 by jadedANDcynical because: one "to" too many
