UTSA and SwRI shed light on mysteries of the universe with IBEX

UTSA and SwRI shed light on mysteries of the universe with IBEX

An artist's rendition of IBEX.

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(Jan. 11, 2016) -- Top-tier faculty at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI®) have been pursuing the mysteries of our solar system and beyond through their collaborative efforts on the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX). The NASA satellite, launched in 2008 for what was originally meant to be a two-year mission, has repeatedly shocked the scientific community, continuing to make discoveries that have overturned decades of scientific research.

“The IBEX mission has been very scientifically rewarding,” said Dave McComas, principal investigator for the IBEX mission and adjoint professor of physics at UTSA. “This is very high-impact research, and in many cases it’s also controversial, which is usually a good sign.”

Fourteen studies delving into its newest observations have been gathered in a special issue on IBEX published by The Astrophysical Journal. The mission’s objective is to study the interstellar medium (the space between stars in our galaxy) and its interaction with the solar wind (a plasma of charged particles emitted by the solar atmosphere). The satellite is about the size of a card table and is orbiting Earth.

Through the university’s joint Ph.D. program with SwRI, UTSA graduate students have worked on IBEX while being advised by UTSA faculty. The program gives the students the opportunity to experience hands-on space flight instrumentation research, as part of a broader offer that includes research in biophysics, nanotechnology, astrophysics and advanced materials, under the advising of UTSA’s top-tier faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Lorenzo Brancaleon, UTSA associate professor of physics and graduate advisor of record for the Ph.D. program, said the effort has been a success.

“Our Ph.D. program is now ranked third largest in Texas.” he said. “In the past 10 years we’ve afforded remarkable research opportunities to many students, including 40 Ph.D. graduates.”

Since its 2008 launch, IBEX has made quite a few startling discoveries. Notably, IBEX revealed that there is likely no bow shock around the solar system. As the sun moves through the interstellar medium, it was previously thought that a shock or wave would form around the edge of the solar system where the solar wind met the interstellar medium. IBEX found that there may be no bow shock.

The discovery that McComas is most proud of, however, is the existence of a very narrow ribbon of enhanced fast-moving energetic neutral atoms around the solar system.

“It was completely unexpected,” he said. “We knew there would be energetic neutral atoms coming in from the edge of our solar system, but no one thought it could form any kind of narrow structure. It opens up a host of very exciting new questions.”

McComas noted that the Voyager probes, launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets and now at the boundary of the solar system, passed on either side of the ribbon IBEX had discovered so they had no idea that it was there.

“The solar wind is a million mile per hour ionized gas or “plasma” that constantly expands out all directions in space and fills our solar system” McComas says. “This is the part of space we touch and interact with all the time,” he said. “It’s not the very distant space. We fly spacecraft through it and it affects us, by creating beautiful aurorae or messing up our GPS. This solar wind fills our neighborhood in space.”

Though much of the public interest in space has been settled on Mars, Pluto and exoplanets, the investigations that IBEX has made and continues to make may help answer some of science’s biggest questions about the formation of life on Earth and the habitability of exoplanets.

“The birth of evolution in Earth’s history may be rooted in excess radiation coming in from space,” McComas said. “That opens the question of whether life can develop on an exoplanet without the solar and local interstellar conditions that Earth had.”

McComas plans to continue working with IBEX, noting that NASA has enthusiastically supported its work and the Team’s list of new discoveries continues to grow longer.

“We knew that it was going to be an incredible mission,” he said. “We had no idea it was going to be this incredible.”

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