2001/07/02 by Brian E. Wood, Seth Redfield, Wood, Brian E. +3
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Atmospheric Ozone and Climate #FOS: Physical sciences #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0107033
23 pages, 16 figures; LaTex plus Elsevier style file espcrc1.sty; to appear in conference proceedings for the COSPAR colloquium on The Interstellar Environment of the Heliosphere
arxiv created 2001/07/02 · openalex publication_date 2001/07/02 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We review what is currently known about the structure of interstellar material in the solar neighborhood, emphasizing how observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have improved our understanding of how interstellar gas is distributed near the Sun. The nearby ISM is not uniform but shows variations in both temperature and metal abundances on distance scales of just a few parsecs. The observations also show that nearby gas does not have a single uniform velocity vector. Instead, different components are often seen in different directions for even very short lines of sight. However, interpretation of these components remains difficult. It is uncertain whether the components represent physically distinct clouds or perhaps are just symptomatic of velocity gradients within the cloud. Finally, since it is the local interstellar medium's interaction with the solar wind that is the primary application of ISM studies considered in these proceedings, we also review how the same HST data used to study the local ISM structure has also been used to study both the heliospheric interaction with the solar wind and also "astrospheric" interactions with the winds of other stars.