Voyager Enters Final Frontier Of Solar System |
Voyager Enters Final Frontier Of Solar System |
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Jun 3 2005, 10:47 PM
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http://planetary.org/news/2005/voyager-upd...ation_0524.html
Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in space, has crossed the termination shock, the last major threshold in the solar system, team members announced today at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. |
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Jun 1 2006, 03:35 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 778 May 26, 2006 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and Davide Castelvecchi www.aip.org/pnu THE MISSHAPEN SOLAR SYSTEM. Having traveled far beyond the planets in their 28.5-year journey, the two Voyager spacecraft are providing new information on the heliosphere, the teardrop-shaped bubble that separates the solar system from interstellar space. At this week's Joint Assembly Meeting in Baltimore of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and several other geophysics-related societies, Ed Stone of Caltech reported that the heliosphere is deformed, according to Voyager observations, with the teardrop's rounded edge bulging at the top (the northern hemisphere of the solar system) and squashed at the bottom (the southern hemisphere). (See pictures and movies at http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solars...er_2006agu.html ) As Rob Decker of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory explained, the asymmetry is due to a magnetic field from interstellar space pushing on the southern hemisphere. The field is about 1/100,000 the strength of Earth's field but its effects can be felt for billions of miles, since it is acting over a large area on the very dilute gas at the solar system's edge. The interstellar field even squashes an important spherical zone inside the heliosphere, called the termination shock. Analogous to the circle that forms when water splatters on a sink, the termination shock represents the boundary at which the rapidly traveling solar wind (the stream of charged gas from the sun) slows down abruptly and piles up. Voyager 2's measurements indicate that the southern part of the termination sphere might be a billion miles closer to the sun than the northern part. Moreover, forces from the solar wind cause the termination shock to breathe in and out roughly every dozen years. Voyager 1 has already ventured beyond the termination shock, to the heliosheath, the region where solar wind and interstellar gas mix. So in a way, the end of the solar system is not clearly defined. Stone guesses it could be another 10 years (3-4 billion miles) before the two spacecraft pass through the heliopause (the very outermost boundary of the heliosphere) and enter purely interstellar space. The spacecraft have about another 15 years of power left in them. (Session SH02 at meeting; see http://www.agu.org/meetings/ja06/?content=search) Do you have a link to the press kit? Or a press kit etc. of any of the other encounters? Analyst There is the Voyager Neptune Travel Guide online: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1990004096.pdf Other online Voyager documents from NASA can be found here by scrolling all the way down (the spacecraft are listed in alphabetical order): http://www.geocities.com/bobandrepont/unmannedpdf.htm -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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