Washington, Oct 16 (IANS) NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX spacecraft has helped astronomers construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy.
The new view will change the way researchers view and study the interaction between our galaxy and sun. The sky map was produced with data that two detectors on the spacecraft collected during six months of observations.

The detectors measured and counted particles referred to as energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), created in a patch of our solar system known as the interstellar boundary region.

This region is where charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, flow outward far beyond the orbits of the planets and collide with material between stars.

The ENAs travel inward toward the sun from interstellar space at velocities ranging from 160,000 kmph to more than four million kmph. This interstellar boundary emits no light that can be collected by conventional telescopes.

The new map reveals the region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere — a protective bubble that shields and protects our solar system from most of the dangerous cosmic radiation travelling through space.

“For the first time, we’re sticking our heads out of the sun’s atmosphere and beginning to really understand our place in the galaxy,” said David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

“The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with a narrow ribbon of bright details or emissions not resembling any of the current theoretical models of this region,” McComas added.

The IBEX data were complemented and extended by information collected using an imaging instrument sensor on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Cassini has been observing Saturn, its moons and rings since the spacecraft entered the planet’s orbit in 2004, says a NASA release.

NASA released the sky map image on Thursday to coincide with its publication in Science.