OCT 19, 2009 - Giant Ribbon announces the discovery of a cosmic structure no one even suspected might be out there, along the fringes of our solar system. We knew about the heliosphere, the point at which the outward radiation from our parent star reaches equilibrium with the radiation coming inward from the surrounding cosmos. It's analogous to the membrane of a cell, in more ways that one. But lo and behold, when NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft mapped out the first all-sky view of the heliosphere, it turned out to be bisected by "a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin". This bright ribbon of energetic atoms runs perpendicular to the direction of the galactic magnetic field, suggesting that our own solar system somehow interacts with the surrounding galaxy in some hitherto unsuspected way. What we've got here is a gift-wrapped gigantic mystery, a celestial suggestion that we're more attuned to the cosmos than we have believed; more than some of us have believed, at any rate. (We astrologers have always known we're connected to the universe in which we live and move and have our being.)
