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NASA's Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space
For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA's Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.
Members of NASA's Voyager team will discuss the findings at a news conference at 11 a.m. EST (8 a.m. PST) today at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. The news conference will stream live on the agency's website.
Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.
Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information - moving at the speed of light - takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 10 2018, @07:37PM (16 children)
I have found God.
He sends his love.
Yours Truly,
V'ger
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday December 10 2018, @09:05PM
Hey V'ger
Can you ask God to pick up some milk on his way home?
Ta.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday December 10 2018, @10:31PM (8 children)
Didn't he already send his love?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Monday December 10 2018, @10:54PM (6 children)
*Citation needed*
(not from fairy tales books)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:57PM (3 children)
I'm sure she's up there, somewhere, shouting down how much she loves us, wondering why we can't hear her.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:37AM (1 child)
She knows why you can't hear her. It's because men never listen.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:47PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:57AM
Because it makes your head explode ...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:19PM
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Evidence that Jesus existed and walked the earth? There is more evidence for that than we have evidence that Julius Ceasar ever existed.
You can believe about Jesus what you want.
It's not a debate I'm going to get in to. That debate like talking to a rabid Trump supporter. (pardon the redundancy)
For your amusement, I'll leave a quote from Luke 16:27-31. [blueletterbible.org]
Point being: no amount of historical text, no matter from what book, what author, historian, etc, would be convincing.
So there is really nothing of substance to discuss, IMO. You believe, or you don't. We can agree to disaggree, agreeably.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:27PM
Not a problem [soylentnews.org]:
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:08PM
Sure. Unfortunately He sent it in a form unsuitable for human consumption, and trying to incorporate it into the human mind caused it to be converted into hate. Hopefully He has learned from His mistake and uses a more suitable form of love in further attempts.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:17AM (5 children)
Alternate version is the following reply:
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:27AM (3 children)
Well, since the directions to the house are wrong [forbes.com], we're safe from ending up on a shit list.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:16PM
But not the poor inhabitants of the planet which the aliens will wrongly identify as the source based on that map ...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
This is one of those "technically correct but completely useless" arguments physicists like to make: who is going to be around to care whether aliens find us in millions of years? As long as the map stays relatively accurate for, say, 2000 more years, that's plenty.
Doesn't this whole argument presuppose that the aliens have some way to get here? If they have warp drive, I think their computer can crunch some numbers to find the pulsars.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:25PM
I think the point is that those pulsars will not look exactly the same from someone else's standpoint, and it's therefore easy to misidentify which of the billions we tried to refer to.
Having 14 on the map makes it more likely that a partial match will be found anyway, but that depends on their observation skills.
First, the Aliens will have to recover from the horrible sight of those terrible shameful naked human drawings (if they grab Pioneer, or decode the golden record).
> If they have warp drive, I think their computer can crunch some numbers to find the pulsars.
We barely had computers when we went to the moon. We didn't have computers when we crossed oceans to find isolated Pacific islands. Computers are a pretty new thing to us, and may not be needed by others.
Anyway, they'll just follow the gravity trail the probe left, all the way back to us. That's a much simpler and reliable way to track your food through space.
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:09PM