There is a slide show of two slides. The two slides have been prepared by NASA.
One slide shows the placement of the two Voyager spaceships as they penetrate the outside barrier of the solar system. Surrounding the solar system is a barrier composed of three parts from inside to outside: the Termination Shock, the Heliosheath, and the Heliopause. Outside them, they are confronted by resistance from a cloud shown in red of hydrogen (because it is very hot) discovered by the Voyagers. They call the resistance the Bow Shock.
The Solar System is touching the forward part of the cloud which may be thought of as a strand or a nearby neighbor of the cloud shown ahead of the Solar System in the next slide.
Calculations by some scientists show that the Solar System and the main parts of the cloud shown on the slide will intersect, perhaps as soon as in seventy years, around 2078 to 2082. No one actually knows because a denser part of the local cloud could be within the seventy or eighty year projection. Or it could be as many as fifty-thousand years. We can’t know from our vantage point on Earth, or even at this point from the progress of the Voyagers. It is not possible to accurately ”see” that far ahead with current instrumentation.
When a denser part of the cloud our Solar System intersect what will happen?
How much hydrogen will get into the solar system and how will it affect Earth? Two outstanding scientists, Gary Zank of The University of Alabama in Huntsville and Priscilla Frish of the University of Chicago developed various models based on proposed possibilies. Because our local cloud’s density is 1/300th the density of the typical cloud, they proposed that at some point we run into a typical density. Based on their calculations the the barrier that heliopuse would become unstable and oscillate in and out of existence. They say the result would “dramatically alter the interplanetary environment of the earth.” In other words, the cloud would infiltrate the Solar System, and the Earth habitat will be changed.
