How wide is the solar system in light years?

Question

Assuming the distance from heliopause to heliopause, what is the width of our solar system at its widest, in light years?

Answer 1

Hard to say.  It is believed the Heliopause is elongated and not spherical.  Essentially the sun, via its orbit around galactic center, forms a sort of bow wave (like a boat in water) such that the Heliopause is closer in the direction of movement and longer "behind" the sun (see link below for a graphic of this).

Voyager is nearly at the Heliopause on the "close" side and is about 100AU away from us.  The Heliopause is expected maybe around 100AU (give or take 10 AU) or so in that direction.

1 AU = 149,598,000 kilometers

Answer 2

The diameter of the solar system is, at best, 2 or 3 light-years. Past a distance of about 2 light-year (radius), the Sun's gravity is kind of lost in the "noise" of all the gravity fields from all the other stars (and the Galactic gravity field).

One light year is 63,239.8 au

Measuring the solar system through the "bow wave" or shock wave, or through the magnetopause, or the heliopause would all give much smaller diameters (somewhere around 500 au at most for the heliopause = the meeting of the solar wind and the interstellar "wind")

Answer 3

The solar system itself is around 1.2 light years wide on the average. In AU, this is a huge number (one AU are only about 8.5 lightminutes): 75888 AU

The heliopause, on the other hand, is only about 200 AU across.

Lot's of stuff, which is still orbiting the sun (The Oort cloud) is outside the heliopause.

Answer 4

Its 1.6 light years. (100,000 AU)

Answer 5

About 200 AU.  This is just a loose approximation or best guess.  Even the definition of where the Heliopause is is uncertain (check the wikipedia article on it).  The Voyager craft have crossed a few boundaries on the way, hitting the Termination shock and entered the Heliosheath (before the heliopause) at about 85-95 AU (in radius, double for diameter)

It takes light about 8 minutes to travel 1 AU (from the Sun to Earth), so multiply 8 minutes by 200 and you'll have the tiny fraction of a light-year that the Solar System is across.