SOTT: Is the sun a giant comet?
July 11, 2013 | A. James | The Guardian Express
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a $169 million spacecraft
has discovered what many scientists surmised; the sun has a comet-like
tail. The less than 20 foot square craft, displayed the tail which
couldn't be seen before because it doesn't shine, nor does it reflect
light. Is the sun a comet?
No, it is a star. Both stars and comets have tails, which can usually be seen through a telescope. Our sun was not that easy.
"By examining the neutral atoms, IBEX made the first observations of the
heliotail. Many models have suggested the heliotail might be like this
or like that, but we've had no observations. We always drew pictures
where the tail of the heliosphere just disappears off the page, since we
couldn't even speculate about what it really looked like," said David
McComas, lead author on the research and principal investigator for IBEX
at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
Scientists will not yet give as estimate to the
length of the tail, but say it is no more than 1,000 times the distance
from the earth to the sun.
IBEX uses 'energetic neutral atom imaging,' and measures the neutral particles within the heliosphere, which travel in a straight line.
"IBEX scans the entire sky, so it has given us our first data about what
the tail of the heliosphere looks like, an important part of
understanding our place in and movement through the galaxy," Eric
Christian, IBEX mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Maryland, stressed to journalists.
Brenda Dingus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, says that this
discovery could be valuable in other projects such as Voyager I, and
Voyager II.
"These two missions are incredible complementary. IBEX is like an MRI -
you take an image of the whole body to see what's going on - and the
Voyagers' are like biopsies."
Is the sun a comet? No, but it has comet-like traits, such as a tail.
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