NASA's IBEX Discovers ENAs at Edge of Earth's Magnetopause
Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space. But looks can be deceiving. In reality, you've unknowingly entered into a dimension of sound... A dimension of sight... A dimension of mind... You've just crossed into... the ENA Zone - the place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the protective magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet. Traveling at a million miles per hour, the solar wind's protons and electrons sense Earth's magnetosphere too late to flow smoothly around it. Instead, they're shocked, heated, and slowed almost to a standstill as they pile up along the outer boundary of the magnetopause forming Energetic Neutral Atoms, or ENAs. That's what NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has just discovered.