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NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, recently mapped the boundaries of the solar system’s tail, called the heliotail. By combining observations from the first three years of IBEX imagery, scientists have mapped out a tail that shows a combination of fast and slow moving particles. The entire structure twisted, because it experiences the pushing and pulling of magnetic fields outside the solar system.
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Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/SwRI
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Credit: NASA
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These directions are different because the local interstellar medium (mostly gas and dust) move relative to the local stars.The boundaries of the termination shock (red ellipsoidal surface) and heliopause (green) created by the interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar medium is displayed. The camera rotates to a view 'nose on' with the heliopause, and a sphere is faded in representing the region where the neutral atoms detected by IBEX originate. The sphere around the Sun is 'unwrapped' to reproject the IBEX data into an approximately Aitoff projection. || ", "release_date": "2013-07-10T13:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:52:00.850490-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 464053, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004000/a004087/IBEXskymapHD1080_GSEmove.HD1080i.1140.jpg", "filename": "IBEXskymapHD1080_GSEmove.HD1080i.1140.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Same as the movie above, but without the object labels.", "width": 1920, "height": 1080, "pixels": 2073600 } }, { "id": 11306, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11306/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "IBEX Maps Solar System's Tail", "description": "NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, recently mapped the boundaries of the solar system’s tail, called the heliotail. By combining observations from the first three years of IBEX imagery, scientists have mapped out a tail that shows a combination of fast and slow moving particles. The entire structure twisted, because it experiences the pushing and pulling of magnetic fields outside the solar system.To view this video on YouTube, click here. || ", "release_date": "2013-07-10T12:30:00-04:00", "update_date": "2019-06-07T13:53:27-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 463958, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011300/a011306/heliotail720.jpg", "filename": "heliotail720.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Web short covering the IBEX science resultFor complete transcript, click here.", "width": 1280, "height": 720, "pixels": 921600 } }, { "id": 10906, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10906/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "NASA's IBEX Spacecraft Reveals New Observations of Interstellar Matter", "description": "A great magnetic bubble surrounds the solar system as it cruises through the galaxy. The sun pumps the inside of the bubble full of solar particles that stream out to the edge until they collide with the material that fills the rest of the galaxy, at a complex boundary called the heliosheath. On the other side of the boundary, electrically charged particles from the galactic wind blow by, but rebound off the heliosheath, never to enter the solar system. Neutral particles, on the other hand, are a different story. They saunter across the boundary as if it weren't there, continuing on another 7.5 billion miles for 30 years until they get caught by the sun's gravity, and sling shot around the star. There, NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer lies in wait for them. Known as IBEX for short, this spacecraft methodically measures these samples of the mysterious neighborhood beyond our home. IBEX scans the entire sky once a year, and every February, its instruments point in the correct direction to intercept incoming neutral atoms. IBEX counted those atoms in 2009 and 2010 and has now captured the best and most complete glimpse of the material that lies so far outside our own system. The results? It's an alien environment out there: the material in that galactic wind doesn't look like the same stuff our solar system is made of.More than just helping to determine the distribution of elements in the galactic wind, these new measurements give clues about how and where our solar system formed, the forces that physically shape our solar system, and even the history of other stars in the Milky Way.In a series of science papers appearing in the Astrophysics Journal on January 31, 2012, scientists report that for every 20 neon atoms in the galactic wind, there are 74 oxygen atoms. In our own solar system, however, for every 20 neon atoms there are 111 oxygen atoms. That translates to more oxygen in any given slice of the solar system than in the local interstellar space. For media associated with this release, go to #10905 and #3900. || ", "release_date": "2012-01-31T13:00:00-05:00", "update_date": "2019-06-11T11:20:19-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 479484, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010900/a010906/Sun_position_MW_art_only_web.png", "filename": "Sun_position_MW_art_only_web.png", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "The solar journey through space is carrying us through a cluster of very low density interstellar clouds. Right now the Sun is inside of a cloud that is so tenuous that the interstellar gas detected by IBEX is as sparse as a handful of air stretched over a column that is hundreds of light years long. These clouds are identified by their motions. No Labels.Credit: NASA/Adler/U. Chicago/Wesleyan", "width": 320, "height": 320, "pixels": 102400 } }, { "id": 20131, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20131/", "page_type": "Animation", "title": "Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX)", "description": "These animations show IBEX and it's two imagers specialized to detect neutral atoms from the solar system's outer boundaries and galactic medium. || ", "release_date": "2007-12-10T00:00:00-05:00", "update_date": "2026-03-03T15:11:30-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 506615, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a020000/a020100/a020131/IBEXA090000952_print.jpg", "filename": "IBEXA090000952_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "IBEX Beauty pass one", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }