Ancient explorers set sail expecting to encounter dragons on the world's unknown oceans. NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft are searching for dragons of a different sort as they enter the boundary of our solar system – cosmic "dragons" that breathe a strange fire of high-speed atomic fragments called cosmic rays.
Just as mythical dragons were expected to inhabit stormy seas, these cosmic dragons could be found among turbulent magnetic fields powered by the colliding winds of stars, including our sun. The winds clash at the edge of our solar system, and space physicists wonder if these dragons may be found there, or if they are even more distant in interstellar space.
"Does a great dragon, in the form of a cosmic-ray accelerator, lurk within the turbulent boundary of our solar system to breathe out the fire of cosmic rays, or do these rays arise from even more powerful dragons somewhere in deep space?" asks Dr. John Cooper of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Cosmic rays can cause cancer in unprotected astronauts, and a better understanding of where and how cosmic rays are accelerated will improve predictions of how many will be encountered as astronauts set sail on the new ocean of space.
This ocean is not empty. The sun exhales a thin, hot wind of electrically conducting gas, called plasma, into space at many hundreds of miles per second. This solar wind forms a large plasma bubble, called the heliosphere, in space around the Sun. Beyond the orbit of Pluto, the solar wind gradually slows as it interacts with inflowing neutral gases from interstellar space, and then abruptly drops in speed to about 30 miles per second (50 kilometers/second) at a thin, invisible boundary around our solar system called the termination shock.
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http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/dragon_fire.html
I'm going to search the forums. Sometimes they run in a pack.