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Giant Ribbon Discovered At Edge of Solar System
beadwindow writes "NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by surprise. The maps are bisected by a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin: 'This is a shocking new result,' says IBEX principal investigator Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute. 'We had no idea this ribbon existed — or what has created it. Our previous ideas about the outer heliosphere are going to have to be revised.' Another NASA scientist notes, '"This ribbon winds between the two Voyager spacecraft and was not observed by either of them.'"
We already KNEW about this, it is called the Great Galactic Barrier
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Galactic_barrier
It's just the little one for each solar system, and these guys get federal grant money!
The thing being... we have a 2D view of a 3D object. From our perspective it runs perpendicular to the axis of the magnetic field. But without a second observation point that's far enough away from the original observation point, we can't actually know that it actually *is* perpendicular to the axis, or whether it's an optical illusion and really going off at some oddball angle.
Just playing devil's advocate here. It certainly does look as though it's related to the galactic magnetic field, and I liked the suggestion of another poster, that it's basically just the galactic equivalent of Aurora Borealis. But at this point, we just can't *know* that it's related to the magnetic field at all. We could be seeing that giant floating ribbon from Star Trek: Generations.
And my first thought was to the 1992 video game, Star Control II... the documentation that came with that game said that access to hyperspace was impossible within large gravity wells (such as those around stars), and that there was a visible shimmer when you got to the region of space where the transition between dimensions was possible... :)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Would these possibly be some sort of 'northern lights' phenomena? If the earth's magnetic field generates a phenomena at a planetary scale, why not a solar system generating a similar field that interacts with galactic particles?