All of the planets in the solar system are encased in a magnetic bubble. For years, scientists tried to figure out what this bubble looked like, but it’s been hard to measure because the closest point is more than ten billion miles from Earth. By using a model developed with data from NASA missions, scientists have developed a new prediction of the shape of the bubble surrounding our solar system —  and you might be just as surprised as they were to find it looks a lot like a croissant.  About the Magnetic Bubble Originally, they thought the bubble was a comet shape, with a round leading edge — called the nose — and a long tail behind. Research published in Nature Astronomy in March and featured on the journal’s cover for July provides an alternative shape though that lacks this long tail.  Why do we care about “the deflated croissant,” as it’s being referred to as? It has to do with, you guessed it, magnetism. The bubble is made by the Sun’s constantly outflowing material — solar wind. We’ve covered magnetism in solar wind before, even reporting how it gave the moon “sunburns,” which you can read here. To sum it up, solar wind is magnetized, so if a planet, like Earth, has a natural magnetic field, it can deflect solar wind particles so that only a small fraction of them reach the planet’s atmosphere. Basically, this bubble is what is believed to be what keeps Earth, and possibly other  planets, safe from particles in the galaxy. How We Find Data Far-Away You may be wondering — if they’ve been studying this for years and it’s so difficult, how did they find this data? We study what’s around us in space by capturing and observing particles flying towards Earth — such as galactic cosmic rays. We know that these pieces leave the heliopause — the bubble — and are bounced back toward Earth through a complex series of electromagnetic processes. NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission has been studying the heliosphere, using the particles as a radar to trace out our solar system’s boundary. Scientists then use computer models to turn this data into a prediction, so as more data is collected, the better the prediction can be.  What This Discovery Means and More with Apex Magnets As we learn more about the heliosphere’s shape and how it protects our solar system, we can better understand what life outside of Earth would be like. Other worlds are inhabitable due to damaging radiation from galactic cosmic rays Earth is protected by this celestial shield, so by knowing the shape of it, we can possibly find other heliospheres that resemble ours in hopes that it’s protected in the same way as Earth to provide a habitable environment. For more updates on magnetism, browse our blog or subscribe to our newsletter today.