Video: NASA's IBEX Reveals Our Solar System's Tail
Posted on July 22, 2013
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has mapped the boundaries of the tail of the heliosphere using a technique called energetic neutral atom imaging. NASA defines the heliosphere as "the immense magnetic bubble containing our solar system, solar wind, and the entire solar magnetic field." Scientists call the solar system's comet-like tail, the heliotail. Details about it were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.
David McComas, lead author on the paper and principal investigator for IBEX, said in a release, "By examining the neutral atoms, IBEX made the first observations of the heliotail. Many models have suggested the heliotail might be like this or like that, but we've had no observations. We always drew pictures where the tail of the heliosphere just disappears off the page, since we couldn't even speculate about what it really looked like."
NASA says scientists still do not know the exact length of our solar system's heliotail. Take a look:
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