The Solar System Has a Tail

You would think we'd have our own solar system all figured out by now, but we're still learning stuff. That's science for ya.

The latest new thang is that the entire solar system has a humongous tail, estimated to be 93 billion miles long (1,000 times further than the distance from the Earth to the Sun).

NASA is deeming it the "heliotail." The structure is made up of solar wind, particles originally released by the Sun, some of which travel billions of miles past all the planets and escape the magnetic field surrounding the solar system.
The particles are invisible to the naked eye by the time they reach the edge of the field. Scientists had previously thought that something like the heliotail might exist, but until now were unable to prove it.

The proof was found by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, an unmanned particle-detecting spacecraft which launched in 2008 and still remains in orbit around the Earth.
"We did not have any data prior to IBEX to tell us if a tail existed, what it looked like, or how various particles behaved within that region," noted Dave McComas, IBEX's principal investigator, in a blog post today.

But after three-years-worth of observations, the mission finally compiled enough data on neutral particles streaming back into the solar system from the tail, for scientists to be able to identify it and map its structure.

Scientists are still working to find out just how long the tail is. The 93 billion mile length is a conservative estimate. It may turn out to be hard to find the end to the tail, as it most likely just slowly fades away until it becomes part of the surrounding space.

The video put out by NASA (below) is very interesting and informative, if not narrated a bit oddly.