The IBEX Ribbon Energy Budget Against the Solar Wind Power That Sustains It

The ribbon of energetic neutral atoms discovered by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer is the brightest feature in the sky at kiloelectronvolt energies, yet its total power is a tiny fraction of the solar wind power that ultimately sustains it. Integrating representative published ribbon fluxes over the ribbon solid angle gives a ribbon power near 8.92e+13 watts against a solar wind kinetic power near 7.53e+19 watts, a fraction of about 1.2e-06. The smallness of the fraction is itself the informative result: the ribbon can be sustained by the secondary charge-exchange process proposed for it without straining the heliosheath energy budget, and even order-of-magnitude errors in the flux integration cannot change that conclusion. The integration is computed from stated published fluxes with the deposited script, not measured here.