Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Test Of The Interstellar Boundary Explorer Ribbon Formation In The Outer Heliosheath, Konstantin V. Gamayunov, Jacob Heerikhuisen, Hamid K. Rassoul

Aerospace, Physics, and Space Science Faculty Publications

NASA's Interstellar Boundary EXplorer (IBEX) mission is imaging energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) propagating to Earth from the outer heliosphere and local interstellar medium (LISM). A dominant feature in all ENA maps is a ribbon of enhanced fluxes that was not predicted before IBEX. While more than a dozen models of the ribbon formation have been proposed, consensus has gathered around the so-called secondary ENA model. Two classes of secondary ENA models have been proposed; the first class assumes weak scattering of the energetic pickup protons in the LISM, and the second class assumes strong but spatially localized scattering. Here we …