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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, 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.

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  • (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.