IBEX finds surprising changes at solar boundary
Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 16:21
in Astronomy & Space
When NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) on Oct. 19, 2008, space physicists held their collective breath for never-before-seen views of a collision zone far beyond the planets, roughly 10 billion miles away. That's where the solar wind, an outward rush of charged particles and magnetic fields continuously spewed by the Sun, runs into the flow of particles and fields that permeates interstellar space in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy.