Heliosphere has oblique and rippled structures

It has been found that heliosphere contains oblique and rippled structures (see this).

Here is the abstract of the article.

Past analysis has shown that the heliosphere structure can be deduced from correlations between long-scale solar wind pressure evolution and energetic neutral atom emissions. However, this required spatial and temporal averaging that smoothed out small or dynamic features of the heliosphere. In late 2014, the solar wind dynamic pressure increased by roughly 50 % over a period of 6 months, causing a time and directional-dependent rise in around 2-6 keV energetic neutral atom fluxes from the heliosphere observed by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer. Here, we use the 2014 pressure enhancement to provide a simultaneous derivation of the three-dimensional heliospheric termination shock (HTS) and heliopause (HP) distances at high resolution from Interstellar Boundary Explorer measurements.
The analysis reveals rippled HTS and HP surfaces that are oblique with respect to the local interstellar medium upwind direction, with significant asymmetries in the heliosphere structure compared to steady-state heliosphere models. We estimate that the heliosphere boundaries contain roughly 10 astronomical unit-sized spatial variations, with slightly larger variations on the HTS surface than the HP and a large-scale, southwards-directed obliquity of the surfaces in the meridional plane. Comparisons of the derived HTS and HP distances with Voyager observations indicate substantial differences in the heliosphere boundaries in the northern versus southern hemispheres and their motion over time.

What makes the findings so interesting from the TGD point of view, is that heliosphere boundaries contain roughly 10 AU sized spatial variations. These variations are oblique with respect to the direction of the galactic wind. What comes first in mind in the TGD framework is that these could correspond to a icosahedral lattice-like structure with 12 vertices and 20 triangular faces (note that spherical geometry allows only Platonic solids as regular tessellations as analogs of condensed matter lattices). The appearance of AU in this context would be seen as an accident in standard physics but in TGD the situation is different.

If astrophysical quantum coherence is accepted then AU expressible in Nottale’s model as AU= ℏ_gr(M_S,m)/m = GM_S/β₀² = r_S/2β₀², β₀≃ 2^-11/5. AU defines the Bohr radius as the radius of the Earth’s orbit for the gravitational Planck constant ℏ_gr(M,m)= GMm/β₀ assignable to the pair formed by Sun with mass M and particle with mass m in the case of the outer planets in Nottale’s model. Therefore it defines a fundamental quantum length and might appear elsewhere in the solar system. For instance, the gravitational Compton radius of the Sun is one half of the Earth’s radius.

One can compare the situation with atomic lattices where atomic Bohr radius defines a natural scale. The mutual distances of the ripples at the heliosphere are about 10AU. The value of atomic Bohr radius is about .5 Angstrom in the atomic situation. By scaling by a factor 10, this would predict that the distances of atoms would be about 5 A: for atomic lattices this gives the order of magnitude for the lattice constant (see this).

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.