The Insane Discovery about the Edge of our Solar System

The magnetic fields of the solar and interstellar winds collide here, and the inside and outside pressures are balanced. Voyager 1 worked with the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, to study the heliosphere. IBEX is a 176-pound suitcase-sized satellite launched by NASA in 2008. IBEX has been orbiting Earth since then, equipped with telescopes to observe the heliosphere's outer boundary. IBEX detects and analyzes energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs, that pass through its path. ENAs form when the interstellar medium and solar wind collide. Some of these ENAs return to the solar system's center and IBEX. So whenever you collect one of those ENAs you know where it came from. By collecting a large number of those individual atoms, you can create an inside-out image of our heliosphere. Furthermore, scientists discovered that the heliopause changed dramatically in a very short period of time after reviewing data from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.