The Heliopause

Last year I began work on a series of blog posts about astronomy, cosmology, physics, etc., that I grew tired of and have yet to post. Perhaps I'll return to them but until then I stumbled on this video and it intrigued me.

Heads up: You can skip the first minute (which is just internet-style self-congratulations) and you can stop watching around 5:30 minutes in, when it starts yammering on about the larger universe, as if that is pertinent to the edge of our solar system. But the four and half minutes in between is intriguing. 

This video doesn't really tell us anything new, just a follow up to discoveries made a while ago, as in this Nature abstract from November 2019 about Voyager 2. And while this video doesn't explicitly confirm anything I'm about to write, it doesn't refute either. So here it is. 

As discovered by Voyager 2 in the past decade or so, the edge of our solar system is a giant wall of plasma. It seems to me this is where the heat of the sun no longer warms the cold empty space and the wall of plasma is decaying photons that can exist no longer. While the title of the above video suggests that there is a wall at the edge of our solar system, the video doesn't actually go that far. So I will. On the other side of the wall of fire is likely a wall of cold--and yes, I mean a solid wall. A solid wall of Bose-Einstein condensate. 

At super cold temperatures, bosons will link together into a solid. On the other side of the wall of fire at the edge of the heliosphere is, I suggest, a solid wall of cold. It is perhaps permeable, it is perhaps not very thick. Is all of empty space solid? I doubt there would be enough particles to form into anything solid. But around stars it seems to me a screen of ice, like frost on a windshield, should be pretty standard. The wall of cold (protons) would be the other half of the decaying photons creating the wall of plasma (electrons). I'm sure I'm not saying that correctly; photons, bosons, fermions, etc, aren't really protons or electrons, but when the power of the sun begins to fade, the breakdown of the photons could create wildly reactive effluvia. 

Why is this important? Remember this thing from a coupla years ago: Oumuamua. If this is from outside of the solar system, how did it penetrate the wall of plasma and/or the wall of ice? As the outer layer of the earth's atmosphere basically shreds intruders to dust, wouldn't our solar system be similarly impenetrable? (Or at least only penetrable by highly coordinated systems?)

So are we sure Oumuamua is from beyond the heliosphere? Isn't it important for us to track it as it leaves the solar system? Yes, I understand it is vanishingly small but is there something better for NASA to do?

My astronomy binge last year was incredibly disappointing, almost heartbreaking as I've been fascinated by the cosmos since I was a little boy. But our understanding of what lies beyond our heliosphere strikes me as delusional at best, cynical and manipulative at worst and realistically is merely fiction. Again: perhaps I'll return to the subject (I actually did a lot of writing) and perhaps I won't (until something new happens, I reckon I'll just stick with my skepticism). 

The thing about Oumuamua is that it seems more likely to me that it is not alien to the heliosphere but native to it. How long has it been flinging around out there? Just a thought.