Solar Orbiter Reveals a Hidden Complexity in the Sun’s Magnetic Boundary

0:00At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead, with brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy.

1:02Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky. So I want you to just start by imagining something right now. I want you to just picture weather. But I need you to completely strip away everything you usually associate with that word. Like rain and snow. Exactly. There is no rain here. There's no snow. You aren't looking at any dark clouds rolling in over the horizon. So what are we looking at? I want you to imagine this continuous, completely invisible torrent of charged particles, and it's just blasting through space. Oh, wow. And it is moving at over 1 million miles per hour, which is just an unfasible speed really.

2:03Right. I mean, we are talking about the solar wind. And for decades, you know, this has been this immense, beautiful, chaotic mystery for astrophysics. It really has. But today, we are actually untangling a cosmic paradox about our Sun. We are. We're looking at this massive, invisible structure that literally shapes the environment of our entire solar system. It's wild to think about. And a recent breakthrough discovery has basically just given us our clearest look ever at where this wind comes from and how it actually behaves. Yeah. And I mean, the sheer scale of what we are dealing with here today is just staggering. It's hard to wrap your head around, honestly. It really is. We are talking about phenomena that span billions of miles. Right. You know, these are structures that wrap around entire planets and just stretch all the way out into the interstellar void. Just a completely different level of physics. Exactly. So today, we're going to explore the heliosphere current sheet, which is this immense twisting, ungelating structure out in deep space.

3:04And to even understand it, we have to look at this totally daring spacecraft maneuver. Right. One that happened 26 million miles away from the Sun. Which we will definitely get into because that alone is just an insane engineering feat. Oh, absolutely. But honestly, the most compelling part of this entire narrative for me is how these massive solar system spanning structures are fundamentally controlled by, well, microscopic stuff. Right. Like atomic level particle sorting. Yes. The infinitely small dictating the infinitely large. It's brilliant. So let's kind of build this from the ground up, starting with the main character of the story, which is the solar wind itself. Sure. Because you hear the term solar wind. And I feel like it is so easy to just picture this gentle breeze on a summer day, just, you know, happening out in space. Right. Like a light draft between the planets. Exactly. But the reality is so much more violent than that. Oh, infinitely more violent. I mean, this is a continuous supersonic stream of plasma.

4:06And the Sun is just constantly blasting this stuff out in every single direction. Every single direction. All the time. And it is moving at speeds exceeding 1 million miles per hour, which is roughly 1.6 million kilometers per hour. Right. To kind of put that speed into a terrestrial perspective for you, if you were traveling at 1 million miles per hour down here, you could fly from New York to Los Angeles, and less than 10 seconds. Wow. Less than 10 seconds. Yeah. And this is not just an occasional gust, right? Or some sudden solar flare. It's constant. It is a relentless, never-ending outward explosion of material. I mean, the Sun actually loses about 1 million tons of mass every single second to this wind. 1 million tons of mass every second. Every single second. Yeah. Just blown out into the void. That is, I mean, that perfectly sets up the core mystery here. It really does. Because Dr. Keach Uogasawara, who led this major study on this, he calls it a cosmic paradox.

5:06Yes, that's the exact phrase. And for decades, astrophysics has just struggled to figure out exactly how the Sun manages to continuously propel this invisible torrent at such mind-boggling supersonic speeds. It's a huge problem in physics. Right. Because if you think about the basic mechanics here, it doesn't seem to make sense. Not at first glance, no. The Sun has enough gravitational pull to hold Jupiter in orbit. Right. Jupiter is a massive gas giant, hundreds of millions of miles away. Exactly. It's in this tight, perpetual orbit because the Sun's gravity is just incomprehensibly strong. And yet, at the exact same time, it is constantly bleeding millions of tons of this plasma material and accelerating it outwards so fast that its own massive gravity cannot pull it back down. It creates this massive friction point with our everyday intuition, you know, of how gravity and classical mechanics are supposed to work. Yeah, because like, if you throw a baseball into the air on Earth, it eventually comes back down. Always, unless you hit escape velocity.

6:06Right. And to get a rocket to leave Earth entirely, we have to use these massive, highly explosive chemical propulsion systems. Just to hit that escape velocity. Exactly. So now, scale that up. The Sun is over 300,000 times more massive than the Earth. Which means that it's escape velocity is just enormous. Yet, the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere is continuously flinging this soup of charged particles out into the void at supersonic speeds. And it's doing it without any chemical rockets. Right. So understanding the actual mechanics of that acceleration, how it achieves that escape velocity, that is basically one of the holy grails of solar physics. It really is. And I always find it so fascinating to look back at how we even realized this was happening in the first place. That was a history of it, as great. Right. Because back in the 1950s, people generally just assumed the space between the planets was the static, empty vacuum. Yeah, just nothingness. But then you had the scientists who started noticing something weird about comments. The comment tales.

7:06Exactly. They realized that the tales of comments always pointed away from the Sun. Right. And it didn't matter which direction the comment itself was traveling. The tale was always blowing away from the star. It was like they were being blown back by this invisible fan. Which is such a crazy visual to think about. It was the crucial clue honestly. And then a physicist named Eugene Parker. He actually ran the mathematics on this back in 1958. Okay. And he realized that the Sun's corona is so unimaginably hot, we're talking millions of degrees, that the gravitational field simply isn't strong enough to hold on to the outermost layers of that gas. So it's a heat thing. Exactly. The immense thermal pressure basically causes the atmosphere to literally boil off into space. Just boiling away. Right. And that creates this continuous supersonic expansion. But when he first proposed that, people didn't believe him today. No, not at all. At the time, the scientific community thought Parker's math was absurd.

8:06Really? Yeah, they rejected his paper initially. It took years. And it actually took the first interplanetary spacecraft to finally prove that his theoretical solar wind was actually a real physical thing. That is amazing. Vindication for Eugene Parker. Absolutely. And you know, we need to make sure you, listening right now, know why you should actually care about this. Right. Beyond just the cool astrophysics of it all. Exactly. Because this isn't just trivia. This is space weather. Space weather is a very real thing. The solar wind actively shapes the environment around Earth every single day. It does. When this wind interacts with our planet's magnetic field, it's what powers the auroras. The northern and southern lights. Right. Which are beautiful. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings.

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10:06Definitely a Verbo care thing. If my teenager starts calling me Leslie instead of mom. That's a family thing Leslie. That makes sense. Book with support. Not surprises. Verbo care and 24-7 life support. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See Verbo.com slash trust for details. But this win also carries an incredibly dangerous potential, doesn't it? Huge danger's potential, yes. Because a sudden surge in the solar wind can severely disrupt modern satellite technology. It can interfere with our GPS. It can knock out our communication networks. And it can even induce dangerous electrical currents in our power grids down here on the ground. Yeah, people forget that we essentially live inside the extended atmosphere of our star. We're basically swimming in it. Exactly. The space between the Earth and the Sun is not empty. It's filled with this dynamic, turbulent, electrified medium. So when the Sun gets angry, we feel it. Right. When the Sun experiences a violent magnetic reconfiguration, it can unleash what we call a coronal mass ejection. The CME. Right.

11:06And that is a sudden massive surge in that wind. And if Earth happens to be in the crosshairs of that surge, the impact on our delicate technology dependent society can be extremely severe. The best way I've found to visualize this is to kind of compare the solar wind to this incredibly powerful glowing river. I like that analogy. Right. If you are standing on the banks of this river, or in our case, if we're safely on Earth underneath the protective dome of our magnetic field, it is totally mesmerizing to watch. You get the auroras. Exactly. These beautiful, silent ripples of light up in the upper atmosphere. But rivers can flood. Exactly. That exact same river can suddenly swell, breach its banks, and violently wash out completely crucial infrastructure. It's dual nature. It is. But here is the logical hurdle that I get stuck on. Okay. What is it? If this wind is so turbulent, right, and it is just blasting out in this massive 360-degree sphere across the entire solar system.

12:06Right. How in the world can scientists possibly trace a specific gust of wind back to its exact origin point on the Sun? That is a great question. And if we follow the physics of the plasma, the answer basically comes down to magnetic connectivity. A magnetic connectivity? Yeah. See, the solar wind does not just drift randomly through space like smoke from a campfire. The plasma is entirely made up of charged particles, right? And those particles are fundamentally bound to the Sun's magnetic field lines. So it's kind of like a roller coaster track that is just constantly twisting and warping. Right. But the cars themselves are firmly locked to the rail. That's it. A highly chaotic roller coaster, but yes, they are locked on. Got it. So as the plasma flows outward, it physically drags the Sun's magnetic field lines along with it. Oh, so the wind is pulling the magnetic field? Exactly. And because the particles are locked to those lines, scientists can measure the specific magnetic signature of the wind passing by a spacecraft. Like checking a license plate.

13:07Right. And then they can trace that specific invisible thread all the way back through tens of millions of miles of space. Back to a specific spot on the Sun to a very localized region on the solar surface. Yes. That is unbelievable. It's incredible math. But to map those connections accurately, we have to understand the underlying architecture of the entire solar system. Right. The big picture structure. We have to look at the heliosphere and this massive boundary running right through the middle of it, which is the heliosphere current sheet. Or the HCS exact. Okay. Let's map this out for everyone. The heliosphere is essentially this colossal bubble of plasma, right? Right. And it is created by the solar wind basically pushing outward in all directions. Just a giant expanding balloon of solar material. And this bubble surrounds everything we know, every planet, the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt. It's all inside this protective cocoon. And what I find so amazing is that this bubble actually pushes back against the interstellar medium.

14:08Yes. It creates a physical boundary. And it's shielding us from much of the high energy galactic radiation that is just floating around out in deep space. It's vital for our survival, honestly. Without the outward pressure of the heliosphere, our whole planetary neighborhood would just be bombarded. By what? Exactly. By continuous devastating hail of high energy cosmic rays. Yeah. These are particles accelerated to near the speed of light by distant supernovas, black holes, and other incredibly violent galactic events. So the solar wind is acting like a shield. Right. The solar wind forms a physical barrier that deflects the vast majority of that deadly interstellar radiation. Wait. Okay. So if I'm tracking this, right? Yeah. The exact same solar wind that threatens to fry our modern satellite technology and, you know, crash our power grids. Yes. That is simultaneously the material that creates a giant plasma bubble shielding the entire solar system from deep space radiation. It is an incredible duality. That is completely crazy to me.

15:08Right. The solar wind presents a huge hazard to human electronics, but it basically acts as the primary shield protecting the fundamental chemistry of life. Protecting it from just being sterilized by the wider galaxy. Exactly. Without it, Earth would be a very, very different and likely dead place. That dual nature really puts our place in the universe into a new perspective. It grounds you, definitely. So inside this massive protective bubble, we have the heliosphere current sheet, the HCS. And the research characterizes it as this sprawling, undulating surface that basically emanates from the sun's equator. And it stretches all the way out into interstellar space. That's right. And it serves as the definitive boundary between the sun's north and south magnetic field hemispheres. Yes. So picture the sun is just a giant bar magnet. Okay. Simple enough. In one magnetic hemisphere, the field lines are pointing outward. Right. They are pushing away from the sun. Right.

16:08But in the opposite hemisphere, the field lines are pointing inward, pulling back toward the sun. Okay. I follow that. The heliosphere current sheet is the exact geometric boundary where those two opposing magnetic regions actually meet. So it's the dividing line. Exactly. And because the magnetic polarity literally flips right at that specific line, a small electrical current naturally flows along it. Oh, and that is why we call it a current sheet. Precisely. Okay. But the sun isn't just sitting perfectly still in space. No, it's rotating. Right. And because it rotates, this boundary isn't just a flat rigid disk, like, you know, Saturn's rings. It's much messier than that. Yeah. And the visual that astrophysicists use for this is actually a ballerina skirt. It is the perfect visual, really. It's so poetic. As the sun spins, it drags its magnetic field lines with it. Right. And the outward flow of the solar wind basically combines with the sun's rotation to twist this entire boundary into this immense spiraling shape. It billows and it ripples outward. Right.

17:09Through the whole solar system, like a spinning, undulating skirt made of magnetic plasma. It is a fluid, incredibly dynamic structure. And there's a specific name for that shape, right? Yeah. The rotation of the sun combined with that outward radial velocity creates what we call an Archimedean spiral. An Archimedean spiral. Right. And because the sun's magnetic axis is usually tilted relative to its actual rotation axis. It wobbles. Exactly. The boundary wobbles up and down. So when Earth orbits the sun, it doesn't just ride perfectly along one flat side of this boundary. We don't just stay on top or on bottom. No, the fold to the skirt literally sweep over us. We regularly cross completely through the sheet. Oh, wow. Yeah. So one week, Earth might be bathed in a magnetic field pointing away from the sun. Okay. And then a few days later, a fold in the HCS passes over us. And we are suddenly immersed in a magnetic field pointing back toward the sun. So the actual fabric of this invisible electrified skirt is quite literally brushing past our planet as it spins through the void.

18:13Rushing right past us all the time. That is just wild. And so anchored deep in the solar surface, this HCS acts as a high speed pipeline. Yes, a pipeline. It carries specific data in a specific material from the solar corona straight out into the rest of the solar system. It provides us with this incredibly clear traceable magnetic highway. Right. Because the HCS has these distinct, obviously directed magnetic signatures situated right next to each other, it's actually one of the most recognizable structures in space. But if you want to actually study the structure up close, we run into a major observational problem. We certainly do. Right. Because we have this sprawling, twisting, invisible magnetic boundary spanning billions of miles. Right. But we can't exactly see it through a regular telescope. No, it's completely invisible to the naked eye. And if we try to just measure it from here on Earth, we are looking at data that is incredibly old and distorted. Right. Let's just randomly distorted. Yeah. Which brings us to the interplanetary intercept.

19:14This is where it gets really exciting. Right. The journey of the solar orbiter. Yeah. Because we just observed the solar wind from Earth's orbit. We are missing the crucial early chapters of the whole story. Because space is messy. Space is a highly turbulent messy environment. By the time the solar wind travels the 93 million miles from the Sun all the way to the Earth, it has been heavily, heavily modified. So the European Space Agency recognized this problem. Right. They knew that to truly understand the fundamental physics of the Sun, we had to send a highly specialized instrument package deep into the inner solar system. We had to go to the source. Exactly. And that is the mission of the solar orbiter. Let's talk about the sheer engineering required for this maneuver though, because the scale is phenomenal to me. It's an incredible achievement. Right. So the spacecraft was positioned about 26 million miles away from the Sun. Which is roughly 42 million kilometers. Okay. Now 26 million miles might sound like a pretty comfortable distance to a normal person. But in orbital mechanics, it is practically skimming the surface.

20:20Oh, it's uncomfortably close. Right. Because Mercury, the intermost planet orbits that around 36 million miles on average. Yes. This means the solar orbiter is diving significantly closer to the Sun than any actual planet in our solar system way closer flying into this environment of extreme heat and extreme radiation just to intercept a fold in the current sheet. And to survive that close, I mean the solar orbiter has to rely on a highly advanced heat shield. Yeah. How does it not just melt immediately? It's fascinating. The shield is made of layered titanium, but it's coated in this special substance called solar black. Yeah. And this was actually developed from crushed animal bones. Wait, really crushed animal bones. Seriously. The bone char is incredibly effective at withstanding the intense thermal environment out there. That is so deeply sci-fi, but also primitive at the same time. It really is. And the spacecraft has to meticulously angle itself to keep all of its highly sensitive instruments in the permanent shadow of that specific shield. So it hides behind the bones.

21:25Basically, yes. Well, tiny little peep holes open just long enough for the sensors to poke out and take their readings. This is so cool. It's a delicate dance. So if this structure gets hopelessly scrambled by the time it reaches Earth, we are essentially blind if we just try to look at it from our backyard. We are. We have to risk this multi billion dollar spacecraft in that kind of thermal gauntlet to catch what the researchers called the youngest version of the solar wind ever studied. The pristine wind. Right. And to put this in perspective for you listening, think about trying to decode a highly complex, you know, secret recipe from a master chef. Good analogy. Right. If you want to figure out the exact ingredients and the chemical reactions, you really need to taste the dish right as it leaves the kitchen. Exactly. That is the youngest solar wind fresh off the corona before anyone messes with it. But if you try to analyze that same exact dish after it has been sitting out at a massive buffet for hours. It's ruined. Right. People have mixed things into it. It's bumped into other dishes. The temperature has completely changed. That's the solar wind by the time it reaches Earth. Yes. It has traveled 93 million miles. It has been violently altered.

22:37And altered is putting it lightly. The space between the sun and Earth is filled with what we call stream interaction regions. Dream interaction region. Okay. What is that? Well, the sun doesn't just blow wind at one constant uniform speed. Okay. It releases fast wind. And it releases slow wind. Okay. And because the sun is rotating, the fast wind eventually catches up to the slow wind ahead of it. And they crash. Finally crashing into it. Yes. Creating massive shock waves and turbulence. So the recipe gets all mashed together. Exactly. The magnetic fields tangle and reconnect. So the original signature that pristine recipe of how it was forged down in the corona is completely scrambled. Wow. So by placing the solar orbiter well inside the orbiter mercury and keeping it packed with these state of the art mass spectrometers and magnetometers. We are analyzing the plasma before the buffet ruins it. Yes. We are catching the particles while they still carry the untouched original fingerprints of their creation. And this is exactly where the physics gets incredibly compelling. Oh, absolutely.

23:41Because the orbiter is flying through this extreme super heated environment. The instruments are recording massive amounts of data. Right. And the spacecraft physically crosses the invisible boundary of the current sheet. Right. And nestled in all that data, the instruments detect an anomaly. A very specific anomaly. Right. It is this microscopic revelation that fundamentally changes how we view this massive structure spanning the entire solar system. The findings, which are published in the astrophysical journal, they basically revolve around a highly localized distinct shift in the composition of ions. Right. Exactly at the boundary of the HCS. Exactly. So we should probably define that for a second because the corona is running at millions of degrees. The atoms that make up the solar atmosphere are essentially being cooked, right? Oh, they're being incinerated. They are colliding with such extreme kinetic violence that their electrons are literally being stripped away rip right off. So instead of normal neutral atoms, you were left with these highly charged ions. Right.

24:44Atoms missing electrons and they are just baking in that intense magnetic field. Exactly. The extreme temperature turns the gas to a plasma. Okay. And Dr. Ocasoar's team was using the solar wind analyzer on the orbiter to measure the exact elemental makeup of that plasma as they flew through the boundary. And what they found was the sudden really sharp decrease in the ratio of iron to oxygen ions. Right. But the really crucial detail here is the exact location of that decrease. Why is the location so important? Well, if you look at the bulk plasma on either side of the current sheet, the environment looks largely identical. Okay. So the sides look the same. The temperature is the same. The overall density is similar. The general behavior of the wind hasn't changed at all. Right. But perfectly nested within that uniformity, synchronized precisely with the exact moment, the magnetic field polarity flips from north to south. The amount of iron relative to oxygen just permits exactly right at the flip. See, I need a second to process the actual mechanics of that.

25:51It's a lot to take in because we just established that this structure is the size of the entire solar system. Right. It creates a protective bubble against the galaxy itself. It does. But you are saying a tiny dip in the amount of iron and oxygen like a literal microscopic change in the atomic makeup somehow dictates something fundamental about a structure larger than our entire planetary system. That is exactly what I'm saying. Why does this specific drop in these two heavy elements matter so much? Because it forces us to completely rethink the mechanical nature of the boundary itself. Okay. How so? Well, is the heliosphere a current sheet? Just a passive ripple in space? You know, is it just a geometric side effect of the magnetic field flipping? Like is it just a coincidence? Right. And this microscopic shift in elements proves the answer is no. It's not passive. It proves that the HCS is physically intrinsically linked to a process where the sun actively sorts ions in the corona before they are ever released into the solar wind.

26:55Wait, if it is specifically iron and oxygen dropping, that tells me this isn't just a random blast of plasma. Not random at all because those are heavy elements. So is the sun's magnetic field acting like a centrifuge or something? Essentially yes. Physically separating elements by their weight and their charge before they can even escape. That's the perfect way to visualize it. In physics, we look at the mass to charge ratio of an ion. Iron is a much heavier element than oxygen. Even when stripped of many of its electrons, an iron ion behaves very differently in a magnetic field than a lighter oxygen ion. Okay, I followed that. Think of it like a coin sorting machine. A coin sorter, right? If you pour a bucket of mixed coins down a ramp, the physical properties of the coins, their diameter and their weight dictate which specific slot they have. Oh, that makes total sense. The sun's magnetic loops at the base of the current sheet are acting exactly like the tracks of that coin sorter. So as the plasma is just churning down there at millions of degrees, the magnetic loops are trapping the heavier iron differently than the lighter oxygen, holding some of it back while letting other elements slip right through the boundary. Exactly.

28:04The fact that this specific ratio drops right at the magnetic flip means the field lines are actively filtering a material based on its physical property. That is staggering. The structure of the HCS isn't just passively carrying whatever plasma happens to be lying around. No. The magnetic architecture itself is dictating which specific heavy elements get released into the deep space pipeline. So the macro scale structure that we see spanning out past Pluto is being dictated by an invisible microscopic coin sorting mechanism happening at the atomic level on the surface of the star. It really is. It inextricably links the infinitely large with the infinitely small. Yes. It proves that the current sheet is a manifestation of an active mechanical filtering process. Wow. The magnetic field is physically organizing individual atoms of iron and oxygen before it violently blasts them into the solar system. This completely changes the way we have to think about stellar mechanics. Honestly. It's a huge leap forward. But you know, I really appreciate Dr. Augusto Aras restraint here. Yes, his conclusion is very grounded because he points out this really fascinating limitation to this new data.

29:17He notes that this data does not completely define the absolute origins of the HCS. Right. It's not the final answer. It doesn't give us some tidy unified theory of everything that just solves the 50 year old cosmic paradox overnight. No physics rarely works like that. Instead, it provides a highly detailed multifaceted view that includes these newly measurable variations of particle types. And that restraint is really the hallmark of rigorous astrophysics. Yeah. When we are dealing with systems as chaotic and deeply complex as the solar corona, one single spacecraft intercept doesn't just rewrite the textbook instantly. Right. But what this observation does do is firmly set the boundary conditions for all future physics models. I love this because it is just a beautiful real time example of how science actually operates on the ground. It really is. Because we all grow up with this mythology that science is just a series of isolated Eureka moments, right? Like an apple falls on the head and suddenly classical mechanics is perfectly understood forever. Right. The lone genius figuring it all out at once. Exactly.

30:23But the reality is just a slow, grueling process of elimination. That's exactly what it is. As Augustoara implies, this work is really about defining what any successful theory has to explain. It is building the mathematical box that the final answer eventually has to fit inside. That's a great way to put it. Because, you know, before this data, a theoretical physicist could write a complex magneto hydrodynamic model of the solar wind. Okay. And as long as the math explained the supersonic speed, it was basically considered a viable theory. But now. But now that is no longer good enough. Right. Now, any future model attempting to explain how the solar wind is heated or how magnetic reconnection works in the corona, it absolutely must satisfy these new constraints. Your math has to account for the coin. Exactly. Your new model must mathematically prove exactly why the iron to oxygen ratio drops right at the magnetic polarity flip. Wow. If your equations can't explain the coin sorting machine, your model is wrong.

31:23It's just so definitive. We eliminate the models that don't fit the new constraints. And we inch a little closer to the fundamental truth of how our star operates. Step by step. It is truly staggering when you kind of step back and just look at the colossal leap in scale we explore today from the atoms to the galaxy. Exactly. We started by looking at the microscopic physics of individual atoms. Right. Iron an oxygen ions getting cooked stripped of their electrons and literally being sorted by their mass and their charge on the surface of the sun. And then we zoomed out. Right. We zoomed out to see how that tiny microscopic sorting mechanism is tied to this continuous supersonic solar wind blasting outward at over one million miles per hour. It's an incredible chain of events. And then we zoomed out even further to see this vast twisting ballerina skirt of the heliosphere at current sheet. Ribbling all the way out past the planets pushing back the interstellar medium and creating this massive bubble that literally shields our entire solar system from galactic radiation is a profound reminder of the absolute interconnectedness of the physical universe.

32:30It really is everything touches everything else. Yeah, the microscopic behaviors of charged ions directly dictate the massive macroscopic structures in space. Right. And those macroscopic structures dictate the very environment in which our planet and life itself is actually able to exist. It gives you a whole new respect for the sky. So the next time you are reading the news and you hear about a satellite glitch or a power grid warning. Right. Or hear warnings about interference with the grid. Or maybe you are just lucky enough to look up at night and see the Aurora Borealis dancing in the sky. Yeah. Or honestly, even if you are just staring up into the dark seemingly empty space between the planets, I really want you to remember that it is not empty at all. Not even a little bit empty. It is this dynamic, highly electrified high speed pipeline of plasma. And it is intricately managed and mechanically sorted by our sun's twisting magnetic boundaries. We are swimming in the extended atmosphere of a very volatile star. We really are. And thanks to daring missions like the solar orbiter, we are finally beginning to map the currents.

33:35Which honestly leaves me with one final kind of provocative thought for you to show on today. Oh, all right. Let's hear it. Because our sun is just a yellow door. Right. A G-type main sequence star. It is a relatively standard, peaceful, everyday star in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Very average. Right. So if our everyday ordinary sun is utilizing such incredibly complex microscopic ion sorting mechanisms precisely at its massive magnetic boundaries, just to shape its standard solar wind. Oh, I see where you're going with this. What infinitely more complex, violent and extreme sorting processes might be occurring right now in the massive magnetic sheets of other much more extreme stars. That is terrifying to think about. Right. Just think about the rapidly spinning pulsars or the terrifyingly magnetic magnetars that are just scattered all across the galaxy. It's a force as there would just be incomprehensible. Imagine the continuous invisible torrent of charged particles they're blasting through space right now. Unimaginable power. Now just imagine what else is out there waiting for us to fly a little closer and take a taste.