The IBEX Ribbon: are we in for a new era in the Sun's voyage through the Galaxy?
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - 07:31
in Astronomy & Space
Is the Sun going to enter soon a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas? Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos Labs, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the Ribbon of enhanced emissions of Energetic Neutral Atoms, discovered last year by a NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.