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Hydraulic Jump on interstellar scale.

Heliopause. The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance.



Interesting! What is the interstellar medium? Is it entirely the combined stellar winds of all the other stars, or are there other components?

My initial intuition was to wonder why the vectors of all the other stellar winds wouldn't be expected to nearly cancel each other out, but then it seems like the ones that would be pushing in the same direction as the sun's would have been blocked on the other side of the sphere, so it does seem to make sense that the net direction would be to point inward. But then I realized that I have no idea if any of that reflects an accurate mental model of what's going on :)


But again, why is it a sudden cut-off and not a gradual one?





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