Various: NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft last year to investigate the edges of the heliosphere—the insulating bubble the sun creates around the solar system. IBEX principal investigator David McComas talks to NPR's Ira Flatow on the first surprising results that were published by Science on Friday.
What did IBEX discover?
At the boundary of our Solar System, the interactions between solar wind particles and interstellar medium particles create Energetic Neutral Atoms (ENAs), particles with no charge that move very fast.
Some of the ENAs happen to be travel inwards through the Solar System toward Earth where IBEX can collect them. This region emits no light and so cannot be observed by conventional telescopes.
The five maps released by the group on Friday show that ENA's are not uniformly spread across the sky, which was the opposite of what was expected with the existing theoretical models of the heliosphere's behavior.
Instead there is there is an arc-shaped region in the sky that is creating a large amount of ENAs, showing up as a bright, narrow ribbon on the maps.
IBEX is also observing many more ENAs from smaller regions in the sky than researchers thought they would.
The ribbon appears to be produced by the alignment of magnetic fields outside our heliosphere. "These observations suggest that the interstellar environment has far more influence on structuring the heliosphere than anyone previously believed," says McComas on the IBEX site.
Related Science papers
Tying up the Solar System with a ribbon of charged particles
Global observations of the interstellar interaction from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX)
Width and variation of the ENA flux ribbon observed by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer
Structures and spectral variations of the outer heliosphere in IBEX energetic neutral atom maps
Comparison of Interstellar Boundary Explorer observations with 3-D global heliospheric models
Direct observations of Interstellar H, He, and O by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer
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