Submitted on August 21, 2009
Accepted on October 2, 2009

Global Observations of the Interstellar Interaction from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX)

¹ Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX 78228, USA.; University of Texas, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA.
² Physikalisches Institut, University of Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland.
³ Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 00-716 Warsaw, Poland.
⁴ NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
⁵ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
⁶ Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, MD 20723, USA.
⁷ University of Bonn, 53115 Bonn, Germany.
⁸ Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany.
⁹ University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
¹⁰ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.
¹¹ Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA.
¹² University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
¹³ University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
¹⁴ University of Alabama, Huntsville, AL 35805, USA.
¹⁵ Moscow State University, 119899 Moscow, Russia.; Space Research Institute (IKI), Russian Academy of Sciences, 117997 Moscow, Russia.; Institute for Problems in Mechanics, Russian Academy of Sciences, 117526 Moscow, Russia.
¹⁶ University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA.
¹⁷ Adler Planetarium, Chicago, IL 60605, USA.
¹⁸ Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, MD 20723, USA.; Office for Space Research and Technology, Academy of Athens, 106 79 Athens, Greece.
¹⁹ Space Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA.
²⁰ Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX 78228, USA.
²¹ Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
D. J. McComas , E-mail: dmccomas{at}swri.org

The Sun moves through the local interstellar medium, continuously emitting ionized, supersonic solar wind plasma and carving out a cavity in interstellar space, called the heliosphere. The recently launched Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has completed its first all-sky maps of the interstellar interaction at the edge of the heliosphere by imaging energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) emanating from this region. We find a bright ribbon of ENA emission unpredicted by prior models or theories that may be ordered by the local interstellar magnetic field interacting with the heliosphere. This ribbon is superposed on globally distributed flux variations ordered by both the solar wind structure and the direction of motion through the interstellar medium. Our results indicate that the external galactic environment strongly imprints the heliosphere.