Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Oxygen deficiency

The IBEX detector has been sampling the extra-solar wind, and finds that it doesn't have as much oxygen (atomic, that is) as the solar wind. They look at the oxygen/neon ratio, and find the solar wind has about 5.6 oxygen to each neon while the extra-solar wind has 3.7. So either the extra-solar wind comes from somewhere else than the sun did (not hard to accomplish in a rotating galaxy, BTW), or oxygen is tied up in dust outside the system. Or in the process of forming a star the magnetic fields somehow segregates heavier ions away from the star.

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