NASA findings reveal solar system's tail

The bubble created by the solar wind and magnetism that surrounds the solar system is larger and more interesting that previously thought, NASA scientists said Wednesday. The researchers used data collected by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer to make their discovery.?

By Megan Gannon,?SPACE.com / July 10, 2013

An artist's concept of our heliosphere, which is a bubble in space created by the solar wind and solar magnetic field.

NASA

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Astronomers have gotten the first-ever peek at our solar system's tail, called the heliotail, finding that it's shaped like a four-leaf clover, NASA scientists announced today (July 10).

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The discovery was made using NASA's?Interstellar Boundary Explorer?(IBEX), a coffee table-sized spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system.

"Many models have suggested the heliotail might look like this or like that, but we have had no observations," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex., said in a statement. "We always drew pictures where the tail of the solar system just trailed off the page, since we couldn't even speculate about what it really looked like." [Images: NASA's IBEX Sees Our Solar System's Tail]

The tail drags behind the bullet-shaped heliosphere, or the bubble surrounding our solar system that's created by the solar wind and solar magnetic field. Our heliotail is "a much larger structure with a much more interesting configuration" than scientists had previously predicted, McComas added during a news conference announcing the finding.

Researchers say the comet-like tail is inflated by the solar wind of particles streaming off the sun, and the four-leaf clover shape is the result of fast solar wind shooting out near the sun's poles and slower wind flowing from near the sun's equator. The finding is based on the first three years of IBEX's measurements of energetic neutral atoms.

In the interstellar boundary region, charged particles from the sun stream outward far beyond the planets toward the gas- and dust-filled space between stars. Collisions between these particles and interstellar material create fast-moving particles with no charge, known as energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs. Some of these particles speed inward toward the sun, where IBEX can detect them from its perch 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) above Earth.

"Scientists have always presumed that the heliosphere had a tail," Eric Christian, IBEX mission scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a Google+ Hangout announcing the findings. "But this is actually the first real data that we have to give us the shape of the tail."

Though IBEX data has given scientists an idea of the shape and structure of the heliotail, they say they have not been able to measure its length particularly well. They think it is probably evaporating over something like 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun, McComas said.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/Gkh18tXDfxc/NASA-findings-reveal-solar-system-s-tail

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