We are all living in a bubble. In pandemic times, we've been stuck in our little social bubbles for nearly a year. Politically speaking, we've been living in bubbles for decades, probably. But astronomically speaking, this thing has been going on for about 4.5 billion years, ever since the Sun ignited its internal nuclear reactor and began blowing out a steady flow of charged particles, the solar wind.
The blowing of the solar wind creates an enormous magnetic bubble around the Sun, known as the heliosphere. The interstellar medium — the wisps of atoms and molecules that flow between the stars — is pushed away by the heliosphere. Earth and all of the other major planets are embedded deep inside, cut off from the rest of our galaxy. The team that has developed the Interstellar Probe concept want to escape from the trap.
Kirby Runyon, a planetary geomorphologist at Johns ...
