Hi Ryan,

That's a very interesting question. Our Sun is a star like many of the other stars that we see in the sky at night. Light from the Sun can travel very far into space, beyond the boundaries of our solar system. However, as visible light and other types of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun travel further into space, their intensity decreases dramatically. To an observer in another solar system, our Sun would look a lot like the stars we see on Earth at night.

The Sun is also continuously sending out streams of ionized gas, called a "plasma," into space at speeds of about 400 km per second (or about 800,000 miles per hour!). The Sun's magnetic field also extends out into interplanetary space. The region of space affected by the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field of our Sun is called the "heliosphere" by space scientists. The heliosphere encompasses a region of space that extends billions of miles away from the Sun. The outer boundary of the heliosphere is called the "heliopause" and just inside the heliopause is an enormous shock wave called the "termination shock." Recently, a spacecraft called Voyager 1 appears to have crossed the termination shock. You can learn more about the heliosphere and the termination shock here: http://www.nasa.gov/visio...tem/voyager_agu.html

If you would like to hear a sound file created from Voyager data of a crossing of the termination shock, follow this link: http://www-pw.physics.uio...r/termination-shock/

Kris