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A NASA spacecraft picks up a strange “buzz” outside our solar system.
Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever built, like one of two spacecraft launched towards the edge of the solar system 44 years ago. Its journey has taken it to the edge and beyond – and it is now traversing the “interstellar medium” beyond the influence of our Sun.
The spacecraft’s devices trying to analyze this interstellar medium heard the sound of a stationary drone, which appears to be the sound of the universe outside our region.
The drone appears to emit interstellar gases or plasma waves into largely empty interstellar space.
“Its color is very pale and monotonous because it is in a narrow frequency range,” said Stella Koch-Acker, a Cornell University doctoral student in astronomy, who discovered the resurgence. “We are monitoring the low and continuous hum of interstellar gas.”
The results indicate that there are more interstellar gases than scientists previously thought. Scientists aren’t sure what low-level activity would cause the noise, but they suggest it could be the result of “thermally excited plasma oscillations.”
The researchers hope to use the drone to understand how the interstellar medium interacts with the boundaries of the solar system and how those boundaries – known as the heliosphere – are formed by the larger interstellar environment.
When the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed this solar period, it detected disturbances in gas in interstellar space caused by our sun and could be seen in the information it sends back to Earth. But between them there was a constant hum in the background.
“The interstellar medium is like a gentle or calm rain,” said lead author James Cordes, professor of astronomy George Feldstein. “In a solar flare, it’s like detecting a burst of lightning in a thunderstorm and then reverting to a light rain.”
Even though Voyager 1 is now surprisingly far from us – 14 billion kilometers from Earth, advancing all the time – it can only send limited amounts of information. Researchers are receiving around 160 bits per second from the spacecraft, far less than the relatively limited 21 kbps spacecraft could deliver when first launched.
This data is sent to Earth through the Deep Space Network, a set of facilities spread around the world that collects information from spacecraft elsewhere in the solar system – and beyond.
Voyager is expected to continue to analyze this interstellar medium over the next several years, and researchers hope some of this work will allow them to continue to track the density of space outside our solar system. In the recently published article, the researchers also suggested that future stellar missions could provide more details about the plasma buzz.
“We never had the opportunity to assess it. “We now know that we don’t need an accidental sun-related event to measure interstellar plasma,” said Shami Chatterjee, a scientist at Cornell University.
“No matter what the sun does, Voyager returns the details. “This is the intensity I’m swimming at now,” the vehicle says. And here it is now. And here it is now. And here it is now. Traveling is very far and will do so constantly.
An article describing the results, “Continuous Plasma Waves in Interstellar Space Discovered by Voyager 1,” was published today in Natural astronomy.
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