NASA scientists and University of New Hampshire (UNH) astrophysicists have discovered a change in interstellar space winds, according to a press release.
Involved in NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, the team of scientists discovered particles being blown into the solar system from outside. The discovery pointed to a change in the winds over the past 40 years.
"It was very surprising to find that changes in the interstellar flow show up on such short time scales because interstellar clouds are astronomically large," said co-author Eberhard Möbius, UNH principal scientist for the IBEX mission
The findings will help the team plot out a location for the Milky Way Galaxy in space. The discovery is also vital for understanding our solar system's place in the vast and deep reaches of space.
The study, published Thursday in Science, is a data review of four decades of information from 11 different spacecraft, primarily from IBEX. It will also help scientists understand the active and unpredictable nature of interstellar winds.
"This finding may teach us about the dynamics at the edges of these clouds-while clouds in the sky may drift along slowly, the edges often are quite fuzzy and dynamic," Möbius said. "What we see could be the expression of such behavior."
Previous IBEX data showed neutral interstellar atoms traveling in a different direction than the observations made by the Ulysses spacecraft from the 1990s. That initial discovery prompted the team to analyze data from nearly a dozen other spacecraft between 1972 and 2011.
"Prior to this study, we were struggling to understand why our current measurements from IBEX differed from those of the past," said co-author Nathan Schwadron, lead scientist for the IBEX Science Operations Center at UNH. "We are finally able to resolve why these fundamental measurements have been changing with time: we are moving through a changing interstellar medium."
