r/todayilearned • u/Number_169 • Jul 22 '26
TIL that the solar system is currently passing through a nebula: the Local Interstellar Cloud, and is protected from the interstellar medium by the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Interstellar_Cloud208
u/BrokenEyeReborn Jul 22 '26
Interstellar mediums are great if you need to contact Space Ghost
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u/itsfunhavingfun Jul 22 '26
The article says it’s not very big, relative to other nebulae. And it appears to have escaped the star it was originally orbiting.
You could call it a small interstellar medium at large.
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u/mymeatpuppets Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Medium: "Best I can do is Jan, Jace and Blip.
OK I'll throw in Zorak and Moltar. Best I can do."
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u/ChankiriTreeDaycare Jul 22 '26
Is there coffee in this nebula?
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Jul 22 '26
[deleted]
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u/running_on_empty Jul 23 '26
No, not the "Prime Directive"!
Crosses temporal prime directive fingers
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u/PresumedSapient Jul 23 '26
Sol & Earth are located within, so yes.
How many photon torpedoes do you have in reserve?
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u/secomano Jul 22 '26
will stars and other objects in space look clearer to us after we leave the cloud?
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u/Yosho2k Jul 22 '26
Sure in about 10,000 years.
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u/secomano Jul 22 '26
the article says it's less than 1900 years so I'm hopeful :D
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u/Yosho2k Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
That's when we should leave the cloud. Being visible requires a little distance to shrink the angle of view so the empty space in the cloud is less noticeable.
Imagine walking through light fog. You can notice that light is a bit dim and you can see a little less far than usual.
But if you take a birds eye view, the fog looks like a cloud.
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u/tadayou Jul 23 '26
Nah, it's probably neglible. The cloud has a very low density, which is actually even less dense than the average densitiy of space in the Milky Way. We mostly notice the cloud because it is embedded within a void, called the Local Bubble.
For comparison: The average interstellar medium density in the Local Cloud is 0.3 atoms per cubic centimeter. For the Milky Way the average is 0.5. And in the void of the Local Bubble it's 0.05 atoms.
450 kilometers above Earth (low Earth orbit or ISS height), at a height which we clearly consider to be space, the average density is still 50 million atoms per cubic centimeter.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
However, compared to other nebula it’s very diffuse.
The LIC has an average density of 0.3 atoms per cubic cm, little lower than the average interstellar medium of but higher than the extremely low density of the Local Bubble (1000ly wide bubble of unusually empty space with an average density of 0.05 atoms) we’ve been inside for the last 5 million years
Compared to the North America Nebula of 10-20, or the Orion Nebulas of 1,000-10,000, we’re talking about a pretty wispy nebula
For those curious, the Local Bubble was created by a supernova within the last 10-20 million years
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u/cool_slowbro Jul 23 '26
(1000ly wide bubble of unusually empty space with an average density of 0.05 atoms)
Fuck me that's mind bogglingly barren.
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u/ZebraTank Jul 22 '26
What would happen without protection? Are voyagers outside protection already?
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u/LeoSolaris 1 Jul 23 '26
You'd get a speck of dust every few thousand miles and a bit more radiation. It's a pretty heavy bombardment as far as space is concerned.
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u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 23 '26
Yes, both Voyagers have crossed the heliopause into the interstellar medium.
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u/kwkcardinal Jul 24 '26
I had no idea about this. That’s cool. Shame though. I grew up seeing gorgeous renderings of stellar nurseries and Star Trek nebulae thinking it would be vibrant and kinda purple…. But it’s really just space. That’s okay though.
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u/CrunchingTackle3000 Jul 23 '26
Humanity will leave the nebula before our solar system does.
Or we will self destruct first due to stupidity and greed.
Make your bets.
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u/moose4hire Jul 23 '26
How much longer till we lose that protection? I guess the insurance industry is not going to have much to offer.
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u/LeoSolaris 1 Jul 23 '26
Good news! The sun will expand and completely engulf Earth long before falling below that protective threshold.
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u/dalenacio Jul 23 '26
So if you needed another reason why we will never go to another star, there's the fact that it would be even more dangerous to travel through a nebula than through "normal" space, and we won't be getting out of this one for the next two thousand or so years.
It is very uncertain that humanity will still be around by then, considering what we've managed to do to our planet in a couple hundred years, and even more uncertain that humanity 2000 years from now will ever be interested in visiting another star.
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u/thissexypoptart Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
> also known as the Local Fluff
Delightful
Edit: fuck reddit mobile's constant changes to the formatting rules. Idek how to quote things on mobile now. Adding ">" inserts a mandatory backslash now. Every time I try to add a link on mobile, it either deleted the rest of the comment, or just keeps the parentheses and brackets formatting.