IBEX: First results, new mysteries, and a possible explanation

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission was launched in late 2008. The first results of this mission, all-sky maps of neutral atom fluxes, were published in a series of Science papers in October of
2009. The so-called "energetic neutral atoms" (ENAs) measured by IBEX originate from beyond the solar wind termination shock, and their near ballistic trajectories allows ENAs to act as probes of this remote region. While models anticipated certain gross features of the observed flux maps, a number of details were not predicted. In particular, an unexpected bright "ribbon" of ENA flux encircles most of the sky. In this talk I will present background details of the IBEX mission along with modeling predictions. I will conclude by presenting a mechanism that, when incorporated into our 3D models, can quantitatively account for the ribbon.

Jacob Heerikhuisen

UAHuntsville