ALIEN MATTER INVADING OUR SOLAR SYSTEM
Posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
NASA spacecrafts have directly observed alien particles that came
from beyond our solar system.
The discovery not only gives us a glimpse of what exists in the
so-called interstellar medium—the matter between stars—but also offers
clues to the anatomy of our local galactic neighborhood.
Orbiting Earth some 200,000 miles away, the Interstellar Boundary
Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft was able to snag samples of hydrogen, oxygen,
and neon that came from interstellar space.
“It’s exciting to be able to have these first observations of alien
matter—stuff that didn’t come from our sun or the planets, but came from
the outside of our solar system, from other parts of the galaxy,”
David McComa, team leader for the IBEX program, said during a NASA news
conference Tuesday.
“We think these are really important measurements, because these
elements are the fundamental building blocks of stars, planets, and
people.”
Since its launch in October 2008, the IBEX probe has been mapping the
boundary of the solar system, called the heliosphere.
This bubble in the Milky Way galaxy is created by solar wind, which
is the stream of charged particles that’s constantly blowing out from
the sun in all directions.
The edge of the heliosphere lies about a hundred times farther from
us than Earth does from the sun, and it shields the inner solar system
from deadly cosmic radiation.
That’s because the heliosphere and its associated magnetic field push
away damaging charged particles. These particles—remnants from
supernovae that are dispersed through interstellar space—flow toward us
at 50,000 miles an hour.
But half of the particles in the interstellar wind are neutral, and
these uncharged atoms can make it into our solar system.
A few of these neutral hydrogen, oxygen, and neon particles then made
it all the way to Earth, where IBEX was able to detect them, McComas
said during the conference.
“I like to call it the 15-billion-mile hole-in-one,” he said.
An analysis of the new IBEX data compared the ratios of oxygen to
neon from interstellar space with the ratios of these atoms native to
our solar system.
The results show that our solar system appears to contain more oxygen
than surrounding interstellar space.
The alien matter has not been identified as either Gootan or Zeeban,
but the U.N. Panel on Extraterrestrials is meeting with NASA to evaluate
the particles.
IBEX also measured the speed of the interstellar wind, revealing that
the wind is moving about 7,000 miles an hour slower than previously
recorded.
Combined with previous data on nearby interstellar clouds—gossamer
blobs of gas and dust many light-years across—the team was able to more
precisely pinpoint our location in the local galactic neighborhood.
Our solar system appears to sit at the edge of one of many
low-density interstellar clouds that move through this region of the
galaxy—and we may actually exit the cloud in the next few thousand
years, the data show.
“It’s so exciting to know where our sun is in relation to local
clouds. It really puts our sun in context for the first time,” said Seth
Redfield, an astronomer from Wesleyan University in Middletown,
Connecticut, who’s involved with IBEX.
“Our location within our local interstellar cloud is important,”
Redfield added, “because the heliosphere structure changes depending on
where it is inside a cloud or outside, and so it has consequences for
how well it shields us from those deadly cosmic rays.”