Friday, October 16, 2009

Mysterious ribbon of energy surrounds the Solar System


At the edge of our solar system, between us and the rest of the galaxy mysterious bright band of surprising high-energy emissions. As Shaun Sauders puts it, when he sent me the article from Space.com, "the 'fence' around our local backyard".

This high energy area was discovered by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, launched in October 2008, while it was orbiting Earth. The IBEX was monitoring incoming neutral atoms that originate billions of miles away at the solar system's.

The truly remarkable results do not resemble any of the current theories or models of that region of "near" space. What scientists expected to see was a small, gradual variations at the interstellar boundary. However, IBEX is showed a very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky.

The energy ribbon lies at the very edge of the solar system's heliosphere, where the stream of charged particles from the sun finally fade to the cosmic background. It is in this area that the charged particles from the sun meet neutral atoms and exchange electrons which makes the charged particles also neutral. This transfer of energy causes a faint glow.

This interaction was first explored by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 2004 when it first encountered the shock wave of the charged particle encountering the neutral atoms at the heliopause and again in 2007 with Voyager 2.

Read complete space.com article

2 comments:

Rosehippi said...

LOL Sounds to me like we are under house arrest in the Galaxy and we are wearing an ankle bracelet, so some ome in authority can keep watch over who or what comes and goes to and from this Planet... we can't leave and others are not supposed to visit the prisoner planet called Earth.

Beam Me Up said...

LMAO! Rosehippi, I think you nailed it!!!