On November 5, 2018, NASA’s Voyager 2 joined its sister ship, Voyager 1, outside of the heliosphere. The heliosphere is the bubble of particles and magnetic fields that our Sun makes to protect us.
Five new research papers have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy about what has happened since the spacecraft crossed the boundary and fought against the dying of the light. This was called a “watershed moment” in our exploration of space.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that Voyager 2’s findings will help “paint a picture of this cosmic shoreline, where the environment made by our Sun ends and the vast ocean of interstellar space begins.”
As told to IFLScience, NASA astrophysicist Jeffrey Hayes said:
This is a watershed moment in our exploration of space: we have for the first time left the confines of ‘home’ and are taking our very first tentative steps into the interstellar space – the Milky Way galaxy of which we are a part. That’s an amazing distance to come in only 62 years, since the launch of the first satellite. Who knows what the next 62 will bring?
Each of the research papers is based on what the spacecraft’s five instruments, including a magnetic field sensor, two instruments that look for energetic particles in different energy ranges, and two instruments that look at plasma, have found (a gas composed of charged particles).
What is the heliosphere, though? Hayes gave an explanation and said that it was a “porous boundary.”
Hayes also said:
Inside is the space we live in, which is the very extended influence of the Sun and the solar wind that it generates, and outside is a region that is not under that same influence. Both Voyagers found this to be the case. The original model was that the solar wind would just gradually fade away until one was in the interstellar medium; clearly that’s not the case.
The heliopause is a boundary that lets some particles pass through but not others. Because we just went through it recently, with Voyager 1 in 2012 and now with Voyager 2, there are still a lot of things we don’t know about it.
Hayes said the following about the possibility of more exploration:
While the Voyager 2 has yet to enter undisturbed interstellar space, the probes offer a groundbreaking illustration of how the ‘Sun interacts with the stuff that fills most of the space between stars in the Milky Way galaxy’.
Hayes said the following about the possibility of more exploration:
In terms of space exploration, it means that we have only barely scratched the surface of what it means to be in interstellar space. All told, we have entered a new era of exploration that is posing as many new questions as it has answered our older ones.
Maybe it won’t be long until we send Matthew McConaughey through a wormhole.
Source: theancientzen.com
