A scroll to the edge of the sun's influence

HELIOPAUSE

Five formations. One field of light. Ride the solar wind from the corona to the boundary of interstellar space — 121 astronomical units, in a single scroll.

DESCEND

Chapter 01 · 0.00 AU

The Sun

Everything begins in a furnace. The Sun holds 99.86 percent of the solar system's mass, fusing six hundred million tonnes of hydrogen every second. Its light crosses the gulf to Earth in 8 minutes, 20 seconds — and its wind, a breath of charged particles at a million miles per hour, inflates a bubble around everything you have ever known.

Photosphere: 5,772 K
Core: 15,000,000 K
System mass: 99.86%

Chapter 02 · 0.39 – 1.52 AU

Inner Worlds

Four rocky survivors circle close to the fire. Mercury, a scorched iron heart. Venus, smothered under clouds at 464 °C. Earth, improbably wet, improbably alive. Mars, rust-red and patient. Between them: hard vacuum, raw sunlight, and the thin bright arcs of their orbits.

Mercury: 0.39 AU
Earth: 1.00 AU
Mars: 1.52 AU

Chapter 03 · 2.2 – 3.2 AU

The Belt

A ring of rubble that never became a world. More than a million asteroids larger than a kilometre drift here, yet their combined mass is barely 3 percent of the Moon's. Ceres, the largest, hides a salty brine beneath its crust. Spacecraft cross the belt without ever seeing a single stone.

Ceres, diameter: 940 KM
Bodies > 1 km: >1,000,000
Total mass: 3% of Moon

Chapter 04 · 5.2 – 30 AU

Gas Giants

Beyond the frost line, worlds swell to impossible sizes. Jupiter could swallow 1,300 Earths; its great storm has raged for centuries. Saturn's rings span 282,000 kilometres yet average just ten metres thick. Uranus and Neptune roll on through the ice-blue dark, thirty times farther from the Sun than home.

Jupiter: 5.20 AU
Saturn: 9.58 AU
Neptune: 30.07 AU

Chapter 05 · ~121 AU

The Heliopause

Here the solar wind finally stalls against the breath of other stars. On 25 August 2012 — thirty-five years after launch — Voyager 1 crossed this boundary at 121 AU, the first human-made object to leave the Sun's bubble. Its signal, travelling at light speed, now takes almost a full day to reach us. The Sun ends. The galaxy begins.