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posted by martyb on Monday December 10 2018, @07:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the out-of-this-world...-and-then-some! dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @09:14PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @09:14PM (#772571)

    It is also about 89,460,669,138 furlongs.

  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday December 10 2018, @11:14PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Monday December 10 2018, @11:14PM (#772629) Journal

    And 6 of one, half dozen of the other.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:37PM (#772888)

    Which is 7406032787 Rob Furlongs [wikipedia.org].
    It's a much larger number of Edward Furlongs [wikipedia.org], which is only a measure of how fast one can descend.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:53PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:53PM (#772961)

    For MIT grads, that's about 10.6x10^12 smoots.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.