JAN 18, 2010 - Giant Ribbon at the Edge of the Solar System: Mystery Solved? is a NASA report on a discovery made last year by the IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft. What the spacecraft found, in short, is an apparent cosmic structure along the boundary between our own solar system and interstellar space. The structure is electromagnetic in nature, and has a ribbon-like configuration - something like a filament of energy stretched along the frontier of our solar system. Why should there be such a structure at all, and why should it look like a ribbon? That's the mystery. Now Jacob Heerikhuisen, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, theorizes that the ribbon is where solar particles heading out into interstellar space are reflected back by a galactic magnetic field. The Milky Way has structure, so its magnetic field should too. It's enough to give even the most confirmed tropical astrologer pause: the local system has to be preeminent of course, but it isn't independent. The cosmic connection extends way beyond the Sun and planets and other bodies of our solar system, in other words.
