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IBEX Probe Glimpses Interstellar Neighborhood

EMBARGOED until 1 p.m. EST on January 31, 2012

LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, January 31, 2012—Space scientists, including researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, today described the first detailed analyses of captured interstellar neutral atoms—raw material for the formation of new stars, planets and even human beings. The information was presented in Washington, D.C., at a press conference sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Researchers at the conference presented data from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), which directly sampled material carried from outside our solar system across the galaxy by solar and stellar winds. Full details of the research comprise a six-paper special section in the February edition of Astrophysical Journal Supplements.

IBEX was launched in October 2008 and has maintained an elliptical orbit around Earth ever since. The space probe uses a pair of special cameras, one of which was developed to a large degree at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to sample neutral atoms reaching Earth’s surroundings from the edges of the solar system and its immediate neighborhood.

Earth is mostly shielded from direct bombardment by interstellar particles because the solar wind—a blast of charged particles emanating from the surface of the Sun—creates a protective bubble around us that deflects charged particles back into space. Without this bubble, called the heliosphere, Earth would be pummeled by cosmic radiation. IBEX provides the first global view of the outer boundary of this protective bubble.

IBEX also provides a direct sample of the surrounding neutral gas, which blows as an interstellar wind through the solar system.

“Interstellar particles are the raw stuff that form stars, planets, and even us,” said Eberhard Moebius, a University of New Hampshire professor and IBEX team member currently on sabbatical at Los Alamos. UNH developed key systems of IBEX’s second camera. “In the beginning there was only hydrogen and helium. These two elements formed the first stars. When those stars collapsed and died, they spewed their material, including new elements created through the process of nuclear fusion, out into space. We can tell a lot about the evolution of our universe and perhaps gain insight into other galaxies and planetary systems by analyzing these particles.”

With the capacity to detect and analyze helium, hydrogen, neon, and oxygen, IBEX has been able to provide researchers with more information about our galactic neighborhood and raise some pressing questions about it. The IBEX research team has been able to characterize the ratio of oxygen to neon in Earth’s present location and compare it to other data. The IBEX observations suggest that the ratio of neon to oxygen in material emanating from outside our solar system is larger than the ratio from within our solar system and also the Milky Way—our home galaxy—as a whole.

The ratio difference may suggest that the Sun’s present location differs from its birthplace, or that a significant amount of oxygen might be bound up in grains of dust floating in interstellar space. Regardless of which hypothesis is correct, the IBEX mission findings are significant because this is the first time scientists have been able to gain direct quantitative measurements of the hydrogen, oxygen, and neon flow from outside our solar system, along with far more detailed observations of the interstellar helium flow.

Which leads to another interesting IBEX discovery:

The IBEX team has learned that the interstellar wind blows at about 52,000 miles per hour—about 7,000 miles an hour slower than previously measured.

IBEX takes advantage of a nature-provided “speedometer” for the interstellar wind by observing the degree of deflection of the gas on its journey into the solar system and past the Sun. The Sun’s gravity deflects slower atoms to a stronger degree than it deflects faster atoms. IBEX is able to measure the flow direction in Earth’s orbit with high precision, therefore providing the true speed and direction of the interstellar wind. With this tool, the researchers have been able to gain a better understanding of where Earth currently resides relative to known nearby clouds of interstellar material within our home planet’s galactic neighborhood.

These nearby interstellar clouds are denser than the surrounding space and are moving at substantial speeds. Astronomers have measured the speed of many neighboring clouds and wondered about Earth’s position among the closest clouds because the previously known interstellar wind speed did not match with any of the closest clouds. However, the new IBEX observations place the solar system within what is called the Local Interstellar Cloud.

Astronomers tell us that Earth is traveling near the edge of this cloud and will leave it at any time within the next few thousand years—just the blink of an eye on astronomical time scales. When this occurs, the heliosphere, the protective bubble surrounding us, may expand significantly since it will be less constrained by the sparsely populated region it enters. On its journey roughly in the direction of the center of the Milky Way, Earth and our solar system will meander toward and into the next cloud over, called the G cloud (named for the cloud toward the galactic center).

Just three and a half years into the IBEX mission, at a time when the two Voyager spacecraft are due to exit the heliosphere within the next decade, who knows what other surprises researchers will uncover about our solar system and its immediate neighborhood? Only time will tell.

“How wonderful it is to see that some of the same technologies developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for keeping our nation safe are being used to understand how Earth keeps itself safe from the turbulent forces of the universe and to gain a better understanding of our place in the galaxy,” said Los Alamos’s Herb Funsten, part of the original research team responsible for development of one of IBEX’s cameras.

Caption:  An artist's conception of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft.

• IBEX_spacecraft.jpg

About Los Alamos National Laboratory (www.lanl.gov)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and URS for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

Los Alamos honors four for science leadership, research

Stars in hydrogen storage, carbon nanotube spectroscopy, space weather and weapons physics noted for 2011 achievements

LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, January 30, 2012—Achievements in scientific research and leadership are being honored at Los Alamos National Laboratory this week.

Laboratory Director Charles McMillan and the Laboratory’s Fellows organization have awarded the 2011 Fellows Prize for Leadership in Science or Engineering to scientists John Gordon of LANL’s Inorganic Isotope & Actinide Chemistry group and Geoffrey Reeves of the Lab’s Space Science & Applications group.

"This year’s Fellows Prize winners embody the excellence of the science that is so vital to completing our national security missions," McMillan said. "I congratulate each of the four winners and salute their creativity and innovation."

The 2011 Fellows Prize for Research goes to Stephen Doorn of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies and David Jablonski of the XTD Primary Physics group.

The following is a summary of the awardees' accomplishments.

John Gordon has led a team of chemists working on chemical energy that has achieved national and international recognition for the Los Alamos-led Center of Excellence for Chemical Hydrogen Storage. Gordon’s team solved a longstanding problem in the regeneration of ammonia borane from spent, dehydrogenated fuel materials.

Gordon also formed and is currently leading a team that focuses on the conversion of small-molecule carbohydrates into much higher energy transportation fuels and the related problem of generating non-petroleum based feedstocks.

Gordon has built an important Laboratory capability in chemical energy conversion and storage by recruiting and mentoring excellent young postdoctoral fellows and staff. In addition to his scientific leadership in chemistry, Gordon has served the Laboratory and the broader scientific community in a number of important capacities including a two-year assignment to the Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences and serving as leader of Inorganic, Isotope, and Actinide Chemistry group at LANL.

Geoffrey Reeves has been the prime architect and organizer of the Laboratory’s growing effort in magnetospheric physics, and he has been a leader in the development of space weather research as a key element of the Laboratory’s threat reduction mission. He recognized that such a capability could make major contributions not only to the Laboratory’s satellite nuclear test detection program but also to the national Space Weather Program and Department of Defense-sponsored national security applications such as Space Situational Awareness.

Over the past decade, Reeves has formed a team of highly capable scientists with the skills required to attack the multifaceted problem of modeling, understanding and predicting the radiation environment of Earth’s magnetosphere.  His vision has evolved into the DREAM (Dynamic Radiation Environment Assimilative Model) concept to develop a model of the radiation hazards associated with a high-altitude nuclear explosion.  Under Reeves’s guidance, the DREAM team has managed well to balance forefront basic space research with programmatic deliverables. The DREAM team is now recognized by the scientific community as a significant force in the worldwide effort to understand the space environment.

Fellows Prize for Research: Doorn and Jablonski

Stephen Doorn is an intellectual leader in carbon nanotube spectroscopy and is best known in the nanotube community for his groundbreaking advances in Raman spectroscopy of nanotubes, with many examples of “first-ever” types of experiments. He has distinguished himself with numerous scientific accomplishments in the area of spectroscopic studies of carbon nanomaterials, particularly single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Doorn has also developed important materials chemistry to help separate carbon nanotube mixtures and to integrate carbon nanotubes into composite materials. He has published 69 papers with more than 1,600 citations since 2001. Although the focus of Doorn’s contributions is the spectroscopy of carbon nanomaterials, he has made many significant contributions to other areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology. In particular, he has a substantial research portfolio and publication record in the area of plasmonic nanomaterials as surface-enhanced Raman scattering tags and substrates.

David Jablonski is recognized for his significant contribution to the 2010 Level-1 Energy Balance Milepost, resolving a 35-year problem in weapons physics that limited predictive capability. Jablonski performed a careful study of energy partition using Advanced Strategic Computing (ASC) and legacy codes; he isolated and highlighted the contributing factors to this problem and showed how higher fidelity in physical models and mesh resolution achievable with the ASC codes mitigated the problem

In the process of this five-year Milepost work, Jablonski made the ASC code more useful for the weapons research community, pioneering how to use it efficiently and testing various options, and formulated and coded some physical models himself. Jablonski's approach to using this code has become the standard for the weapons community at Los Alamos.

About Los Alamos National Laboratory (www.lanl.gov)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and URS for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.