NASA -- It's a place of electromagnetic mayhem
--- a place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the protective magnetic
bubble that surrounds our planet.
Traveling at a million miles per hour, the solar wind's protons and electrons
sense Earth's magnetosphere too late to flow smoothly around it. Instead, they're shocked, heated, and slowed almost
to a stop as they pile up along its outer boundary, the magnetopause, before getting diverted sideways.
It wasn't until the advent of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX,
a NASA spacecraft launched in October 2008, that they've been able to see what the human eye cannot: the first-ever images
of this electromagnetic crash scene.
Because IBEX is orbiting Earth, it also has a front-row seat for observing
the chaotic pileup of solar-wind particles occurring along the "nose" of Earth's magnetopause, about 35,000 miles out.
ENAs are created there too, as solar-wind protons wrest electrons from hydrogen atoms in the outermost vestiges of our atmosphere,
the exosphere.
And you thought space was a peaceful and quiet vacuum?
