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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: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 10 2018, @07:37PM (16 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 10 2018, @07:37PM (#772504) Journal

    I have found God.

    He sends his love.

    Yours Truly,
    V'ger

    --
    “I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday December 10 2018, @09:05PM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday December 10 2018, @09:05PM (#772567)

    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)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 10 2018, @10:31PM (#772601) Journal

    Didn't he already send his love?

    --
    The thing to remember about the saying "you are what you are" is, that saying: is what it is.
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Monday December 10 2018, @10:54PM (6 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday December 10 2018, @10:54PM (#772622)

      *Citation needed*

      (not from fairy tales books)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:57PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:57PM (#772646)

        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)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:37AM (#772672)

          She knows why you can't hear her. It's because men never listen.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:57AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:57AM (#772687)

          Because it makes your head explode ...

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:19PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:19PM (#772884) Journal

        *Citation needed*

        (not from fairy tales books)

        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]

        “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

        “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

        “ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

        “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”

        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.

        --
        The thing to remember about the saying "you are what you are" is, that saying: is what it is.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:27PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:27PM (#773174)

        *Citation needed*

        Not a problem [soylentnews.org]:

        He sends his love

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:08PM (#772851)

      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)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:17AM (#772692)

    Alternate version is the following reply:

    Dear humans,

    We got your mix tape, and while we're trying to be nice about this, packaging it with directions to your house is more than a bit creepy. Please knock it off.

    Sincerely,
    Emperor Fexhagwotmark III, Ruler of Zebnok V

    --
    Vote for Pedro
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:27AM (3 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:27AM (#772697)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:16PM (#772854)

        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)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:53PM (#772935)

        [2)] But over time, pulsars can newly appear or disappear, which we've actually seen happen since the Voyager probes were launched. As objects rotate and orbit in space, their relative orientations change, so the pulsars that are pointing at us today won't be pointing at us millions of years in the future. Additionally, pulsars that aren't pointing at us today will be pointing at us in millions of years. Compound that with the fact that neutron stars adjust their rotation periods over time (via starquakes and pulsar speedup), and it's clear that both the periods and orientations of these pulsars change dramatically over millions of years. By the time any alien picks up our pulsar map, it will be woefully out-of-date.

        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.

        1) 1.) There are likely about one billion pulsars in the Milky Way. Based on the history of stars and star-formation in the Milky Way, we've been able to determine that even though only a fraction of 1% of them go supernova, there are [...] (one billion) neutron stars. [...] To know which 14 are chosen out of one billion will be a daunting task, since pulsar periods are not unique.

        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

          by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:25PM (#772945)

          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

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:09PM (#772852) Journal
      Should have put the naked pictures on the record. Then it would have been clear that our intentions were not creepy!