A new NASA study has suggested that the sun's hemisphere, a bubble around our planets and sun is actually dominated by two giant jets of material shooting backwards over the north and south poles of the sun.

The sun emits charged particles in a stream of plasma called the solar wind. The solar wind, in turn, creates a bubble termed as the heliosphere that extends far beyond the planets of the solar system.

For decades, scientists have visualized the heliosphere in the shape of a comet, with a very long tail extending some 464 billion miles. However, the new study has found that this is not the case. Rather, the sun is emitting these winds in two jets originating from the poles of the sun.

Researchers concluded that the heliosphere looks a lot more like a crescent moon than a comet. Merav Opher, astronomer at Boston University and lead author of the NASA-funded study said, “Scientists thought the solar wind flowing down the tail could easily pull the magnetic fields in the heliosphere along as it flowed by, creating this long tail. But it turns out the magnetic fields are strong enough to resist that pull – so instead they squeeze the solar wind and create these two jets”.

These new observations were provided by NASA’s own Voyager 1. This further helped to yield the new simulation of the heliospheric shape. However, the new model is expected to be controversial as many scientists continue to work with the accepted comet-like model of the heliosphere.

Although, scientists are naïve to the physics of these emissions, studying them could open doors to understand more about larger, more distant stars, and about the formation and death of stars.