Interstellar space even weirder than expected, NASA probe reveals

[ExomatrixTV]

Interstellar space even weirder than expected, NASA probe reveals ...
Voyager 2 Discovers "Wall of Fire" at Solar System's Edge



In the blackness of space billions of miles from home, NASA’s Voyager 2 marked a milestone of exploration, becoming just the second spacecraft ever to enter interstellar space in November 2018. Now, a day before the anniversary of that celestial exit, scientists have revealed what Voyager 2 saw as it crossed the threshold—and it’s giving humans new insight into some of the big mysteries of our solar system.

The findings, spread across five studies published today in Nature Astronomy, mark the first time that a spacecraft has directly sampled the electrically charged hazes, or plasmas, that fill both interstellar space and the solar system’s farthest outskirts. It’s another first for the spacecraft, which was launched in 1977 and performed the first—and only—flybys of the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune. (Find out more about the Voyager probes’ “grand tour”—and why it almost didn’t happen.)


Voyager 2’s charge into interstellar space follows that of sibling Voyager 1, which accomplished the same feat in 2012. The two spacecrafts’ data have many features in common, such as the overall density of the particles they’ve encountered in interstellar space. But intriguingly, the twin craft also saw some key differences on their way out—raising new questions about our sun’s movement through the galaxy.

“This has really been a wonderful journey,” Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, a physicist at Caltech, said in a press briefing last week.

“It’s just really exciting that humankind is interstellar,” adds physicist Jamie Rankin, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University who wasn’t involved with the studies. “We have been interstellar travelers since Voyager 1 crossed, but now, Voyager 2’s cross is even more exciting, because we can now compare two very different locations ... in the interstellar medium.”

Inside the bubble

To make sense of Voyager 2’s latest findings, it helps to know that the sun isn’t a quietly burning ball of light. Our star is a raging nuclear furnace hurtling through the galaxy at about 450,000 miles an hour as it orbits the galactic center.


The sun is also rent through with twisted, braided magnetic fields and, as a result, its surface constantly throws off a breeze of electrically charged particles called the solar wind. This gust rushes out in all directions, carrying the sun’s magnetic field with it. Eventually, the solar wind smashes into the interstellar medium, the debris from ancient stellar explosions that lurks in the spaces between stars.

Like oil and water, the solar wind and the interstellar medium don’t perfectly mix, so the solar wind forms a bubble within the interstellar medium called the Heliosphere. Based on Voyager data, this bubble extends about 11 billion miles from the sun at its leading edge, surrounding the sun, all eight planets, and much of the outer objects orbiting our star. Good thing, too: The protective heliosphere shields everything inside it, including our fragile DNA, from most of the galaxy’s highest-energy radiation.

The heliosphere’s outermost edge, called the heliopause, marks the start of interstellar space. Understanding this threshold has implications for our picture of the sun’s journey through the galaxy, which in turn can tell us more about the situations of other stars scattered across the cosmos.

“We are trying to understand the nature of that boundary, where these two winds collide and mix,” Stone said during the briefing. “How do they mix, and how much spillage is there from inside to outside the bubble, and from outside the bubble to inside?”

Scientists got their first good look at the heliopause on August 25, 2012, when Voyager 1 first entered interstellar space. What they began to see left them scratching their heads. For instance, researchers now know that the interstellar magnetic field is about two to three times stronger than expected, which means, in turn, that interstellar particles exert up to ten times as much pressure on our heliosphere than previously thought.

“It is our first platform to actually experience the interstellar medium, so it is quite literally a pathfinder for us,” says heliophysicist Patrick Koehn, a program scientist at NASA headquarters.

Leaky boundary

But for all that Voyager 1 upended expectations, its revelations were incomplete. Back in 1980, its instrument that measured the temperature of plasmas stopped working. Voyager 2’s plasma instrument is still working just fine, though, so when it crossed the heliopause on November 5, 2018, scientists could get a much better look at this border.

For the first time, researchers could see that as an object gets within 140 million miles of the heliopause, the plasma surrounding it slows, heats up, and gets more dense. And on the other side of the boundary, the interstellar medium is at least 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than expected. However, this plasma is so thin and diffuse, the average temperature around the Voyager probes remains extremely cold.

In addition, Voyager 2 confirmed that the heliopause is one leaky border—and the leaks go both ways. Before Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause, it zoomed through tendrils of interstellar particles that had punched into the heliopause like tree roots through rock. Voyager 2, however, saw a trickle of low-energy particles that extended more than a hundred million miles beyond the heliopause.

Another mystery appeared as Voyager 1 came within 800 million miles of the heliopause, where it entered a limbo-like area in which the outbound solar wind slowed to a crawl. Before it crossed the heliopause, Voyager 2 saw the solar wind form an altogether different kind of layer that, oddly, was nearly the same width as the stagnant one seen by Voyager 1.

“That is very, very weird,” Koehn says. “It really shows us that we need more data.”

Interstellar sequel?

Solving these puzzles will require a better view of the heliosphere as a whole. Voyager 1 exited near the heliosphere’s leading edge, where it collides with the interstellar medium, and Voyager 2 exited along its left flank. We have no data on the heliosphere’s wake, so its overall shape remains a mystery. The interstellar medium’s pressure might keep the heliosphere roughly spherical, but it’s also possible that it has a tail like a comet—or that it is shaped like a croissant.

But while other spacecraft are currently outward bound, they won’t be able to return data from the heliopause. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is zooming out of the solar system at more than 31,000 miles an hour, and when it runs out of power in the 2030s, it’ll fall silent more than a billion miles short of the heliosphere’s outer edge. That’s why Voyager scientists and others are calling for a follow-up interstellar probe. The goal: a 50-year, multi-generation mission that explores the outer solar system on its way into unexplored regions beyond the solar wind.

“Here's an entire bubble, [and] we only crossed it with two points,” study coauthor Stamatios Krimigis, the emeritus head of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's space department, said at the briefing. “Two examples are not enough.”

A new generation of scientists is eager to run with the baton—including Rankin, who did her Ph.D. at Caltech with Voyager 1’s interstellar data with Stone as her adviser.

“It was amazing to work on this cutting-edge data from spacecraft that were launched before I was born and still doing amazing science,” she says. “I’m just really thankful for all the people who have spent so much time on Voyager.”

Source

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=S4eg95rG18M

Voyager 1 and 2 - 2019 UPDATE Narrated Documentary:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZIB8vauWSI

What Did Voyager 2 See During its Journey Out Of The Solar System? 1977-2019 (4k UHD):

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=39Xo_iOIuJY

[ExomatrixTV]

Why Voyager 2's discoveries from interstellar space have scientists excited

Voyager 2, first launched in 1977, is the second human-made machine to have officially entered interstellar space. Her companion spacecraft, Voyager 1, accomplished the feat in 2013. The data being returned by both spacecraft – having passed beyond the heliosphere, past where solar winds still blow plasma outward from the sun – have scientists excited.

As soon as Voyager 2 left the farthest reaches of the solar wind, the density of plasma actually jumped, according to Phys.org. “The marked increase in plasma density is evidence of Voyager 2 journeying from the hot, lower-density plasma characteristic of the solar wind to the cool, higher-density plasma of interstellar space. It's also similar to the plasma density jump experienced by Voyager 1 when it crossed into interstellar space.”

The information from the boundary between the solar wind and interstellar space is just the latest that the two Voyager spacecraft have imparted. Voyagers 1 and 2 launched in 1977 within 16 days of one another on a mission to explore the outer planets. Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn before heading to the outer boundaries of the solar system. Voyager 2 explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before soaring beyond.

To give an idea of the length of the twin Voyager 1 and 2 missions, in 1977, Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. Watergate and Vietnam were recent, hurtful memories, and the Cold War was still raging. Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, would start making a name for himself in the New York real estate world the following year when he began to renovate the Commodore Hotel. The current administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, was just two years old.

A lot of history has happened since the Voyager spacecraft first lifted off the launch pad. The Soviet Empire fell. 9/11 happened, sparking the long wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The space shuttle program began and ended, with the International Space Station now a permanent home for human beings in low Earth orbit. The internet has bound the human race in a web of information and communication as never before. Diseases have been conquered. Climate change has become a worry and a political issue, hotly debated by politicians and scientists alike. The world population has swelled to more than seven and a half billion people.

That the Voyager spacecraft are still returning good science from billions of miles away is a testament to the state of the art of space technology in the late 1970s. Scientists estimate, though, that within about five years, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will run out of the decaying plutonium that fuels their RTG power generators. Then the two spacecraft will fly forever outward, each bearing a gold audio-visual disk containing greetings from the people of Earth.


Unless the Voyager probes collide with something or are picked up by alien space explorers, they will, in theory, keep flying until the end of the universe.
NASA is already thinking of a true, interstellar probe, according to Space.com. A space probe specifically designed to study interstellar space would be packed with enough instruments and power to study the universe beyond the sun’s heliosphere in detail, far beyond the distance where the useful lives of the Voyager spacecraft come to an end.

Along the way, the interstellar probe will explore the Kuiper belt and answer a number of questions that scientists have, including what happens when solar radiation leaves the solar system and what happens when cosmic background radiation enters. The probe may make discoveries that we cannot yet imagine are out there. If approved, the probe could be flying in about a decade.

When humans might follow is, right now at least, confined to speculation and science fiction. But one day, if human civilization has not destroyed itself in the meantime, true star ships might brave the gulf between the stars, built with technology that can currently be only vaguely imagined.

Scientists speculate that one day we may be able to create something called the Alcubierre Warp Drive, which sounds like something from Star Trek, but has a basis in reality. The warp drive would not so much propel a spacecraft as it would manipulate space itself, compressing it ahead of the spacecraft and stretching it behind, riding a “warp bubble” to achieve faster than light speeds.

The adventures and discoveries our descendants may experience, visiting newly discovered exo-planets, will cause the current space program to pale in comparison.
Mark R. Whittington has published a political study of space exploration entitled "Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?" as well as "The Moon, Mars and Beyond." He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

[ExomatrixTV]

Voyager 2's Trip to Interstellar Space Deepens Some Mysteries Beyond Our Solar System

Is Voyager 2 still transmitting? How far is Voyager 2? Latest discovery

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MGPM58S5Njg

[ExomatrixTV]

Voyager 2 Illuminates Boundary of Interstellar Space

One year ago, on Nov. 5, 2018, NASA's Voyager 2 became only the second spacecraft in history to leave the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our Sun. At a distance of about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth - well beyond the orbit of Pluto - Voyager 2 had entered interstellar space, or the region between stars. Today, five new research papers in the journal Nature Astronomy describe what scientists observed during and since Voyager 2's historic crossing.

Each paper details the findings from one of Voyager 2's five operating science instruments: a magnetic field sensor, two instruments to detect energetic particles in different energy ranges and two instruments for studying plasma (a gas composed of charged particles). Taken together, the findings help paint a picture of this cosmic shoreline, where the environment created by our Sun ends and the vast ocean of interstellar space begins.

The Sun's heliosphere is like a ship sailing through interstellar space. Both the heliosphere and interstellar space are filled with plasma, a gas that has had some of its atoms stripped of their electrons. The plasma inside the heliosphere is hot and sparse, while the plasma in interstellar space is colder and denser. The space between stars also contains cosmic rays, or particles accelerated by exploding stars. Voyager 1 discovered that the heliosphere protects Earth and the other planets from more than 70% of that radiation.

When Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere last year, scientists announced that its two energetic particle detectors noticed dramatic changes: The rate of heliospheric particles detected by the instruments plummeted, while the rate of cosmic rays (which typically have higher energies than the heliospheric particles) increased dramatically and remained high. The changes confirmed that the probe had entered a new region of space.

Before Voyager 1 reached the edge of the heliosphere in 2012, scientists didn't know exactly how far this boundary was from the Sun. The two probes exited the heliosphere at different locations and also at different times in the constantly repeating, approximately 11-year solar cycle, over the course of which the Sun goes through a period of high and low activity. Scientists expected that the edge of the heliosphere, called the heliopause, can move as the Sun's activity changes, sort of like a lung expanding and contracting with breath. This was consistent with the fact that the two probes encountered the heliopause at different distances from the Sun.
The new papers now confirm that Voyager 2 is not yet in undisturbed interstellar space: Like its twin, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 appears to be in a perturbed transitional region just beyond the heliosphere.

"The Voyager probes are showing us how our Sun interacts with the stuff that fills most of the space between stars in the Milky Way galaxy," said Ed Stone, project scientist for Voyager and a professor of physics at Caltech. "Without this new data from Voyager 2, we wouldn't know if what we were seeing with Voyager 1 was characteristic of the entire heliosphere or specific just to the location and time when it crossed."

Pushing Through Plasma

The two Voyager spacecraft have now confirmed that the plasma in local interstellar space is significantly denser than the plasma inside the heliosphere, as scientists expected. Voyager 2 has now also measured the temperature of the plasma in nearby interstellar space and confirmed it is colder than the plasma inside the heliosphere.
In 2012, Voyager 1 observed a slightly higher-than-expected plasma density just outside the heliosphere, indicating that the plasma is being somewhat compressed. Voyager 2 observed that the plasma outside the heliosphere is slightly warmer than expected, which could also indicate it is being compressed. (The plasma outside is still colder than the plasma inside.) Voyager 2 also observed a slight increase in plasma density just before it exited the heliosphere, indicating that the plasma is compressed around the inside edge of the bubble. But scientists don't yet fully understand what is causing the compression on either side.

Leaking Particles

If the heliosphere is like a ship sailing through interstellar space, it appears the hull is somewhat leaky. One of Voyager's particle instruments showed that a trickle of particles from inside the heliosphere is slipping through the boundary and into interstellar space. Voyager 1 exited close to the very "front" of the heliosphere, relative to the bubble's movement through space. Voyager 2, on the other hand, is located closer to the flank, and this region appears to be more porous than the region where Voyager 1 is located.

Magnetic Field Mystery

An observation by Voyager 2's magnetic field instrument confirms a surprising result from Voyager 1: The magnetic field in the region just beyond the heliopause is parallel to the magnetic field inside the heliosphere. With Voyager 1, scientists had only one sample of these magnetic fields and couldn't say for sure whether the apparent alignment was characteristic of the entire exterior region or just a coincidence. Voyager 2's magnetometer observations confirm the Voyager 1 finding and indicate that the two fields align, according to Stone.

The Voyager probes launched in 1977, and both flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 changed course at Saturn in order to fly by Uranus and Neptune, performing the only close flybys of those planets in history. The Voyager probes completed their Grand Tour of the planets and began their Interstellar Mission to reach the heliopause in 1989. Voyager 1, the faster of the two probes, is currently over 13.6 billion miles (22 billion kilometers) from the Sun, while Voyager 2 is 11.3 billion miles (18.2 billion kilometers) from the Sun. It takes light about 16.5 hours to travel from Voyager 2 to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

More information about Voyager is available at the following site:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

[ExomatrixTV]

Imagine if they do the same as Voyager 2 but with current technology, advanced sensors, advanced energy systems, new propulsion tech, much higher resolution cameras, much better transmitters, much better backup batteries, on board autonomous A.I. computer etc. etc. How would this "Voyager 3 ... 2020 or 2021" look like?

[Red Skywalker]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)
Imagine if they do the same as Voyager 2 but with current technology, advanced sensors, advanced energy systems, new propulsion tech, much higher resolution cameras, much better transmitters, much better backup batteries, on board autonomous A.I. computer etc. etc. How would this "Voyager 3 ... 2020 or 2021" look like?

It should look like this electrostatic driven device.
Takes far less time to get there.

More:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=afLsRsd5roY

Tesla was right and Einstein wrong. There is an Aether, available for use, but we don't get the technology and the physics for it. Only because Einstein said there is no Aether?

However, progress is on the edge. Trump has released many patents. Hopefully more to come.

(Some details on the fluxliner:
The electromagnetic coil is a Tesla coil, one primary coil of thick and just a couple of turns. A secundairy coil of fine heavy insulated wire and many, many turns.
The aluminum flywheel is a monopole generator, look that up, low voltage but many amps, and the capacitor plates for the "propulsion" and steering.
The story itself, the physics and the workings are long stories)

Cannot wait for such a probe!

This because of:

Scientists speculate that one day we may be able to create something called the Alcubierre Warp Drive, which sounds like something from Star Trek, but has a basis in reality. The warp drive would not so much propel a spacecraft as it would manipulate space itself, compressing it ahead of the spacecraft and stretching it behind, riding a “warp bubble” to achieve faster than light speeds.

Not some day into the future far far away, we (very very likely, I have no prove) have it now and possibly already for at least 70 years.
The reason is because the principles are simple, not by mainstream science, but by the Tesla aether based science which is already 100 years old.


Hans

[Ernie Nemeth]

Remember the first Star Trek series, the one about the voyager spacecraft?

It had been found by an alien robot and repaired. Now it had a new mission: destroy earth!

"I am Viger..."

[Red Skywalker]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
Remember the first Star Trek series, the one about the voyager spacecraft?

It had been found by an alien robot and repaired. Now it had a new mission: destroy earth!

"I am Viger..."

It was not to destroy Earth, it returned to Earth to find it's creator and share it's collected information with that creator. When it could not get contact, it turned into desperate violence. Until Captain Kirk and his team arrived.

So, YES, I remember. The first cinema movie of Startrek and imo the best for it's time.

[shaberon]

Posted by Red Skywalker (here)
Only because Einstein said there is no Aether?

Maybe at first, but eventually, it was, "If there is an ether, I am wrong".

I would speculate more that it was the Pope who didn't want religion to seem unscientific any more by saying the planet was only 5,000 years old and so forth, and the Big Bang is simply too conveniently irresistable to "Let there be light". Something like a modified Creationism from 5,000 years to "whatever you guys are saying, that's how it worked".

Since they largely control education, new science sits in the universities and then theist or atheist, you are "part of the team", where it is hard to suggest or breathe a word that the science may still be incomplete. That's the feeling I got in science, too, "the math proves it and so the alternatives are wrong". It's very convincing and pretty difficult to get out of.

[ExomatrixTV]

Einstein vs Tesla Aether ... Nikola Tesla Concepts & New Ideas proved himself (validated) 100x more than Einstein ever could.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-rFcr3OGHOk