Said NASA’s Voyager 1, the longest spacecraft on Earth Farewell to the Solar System About a decade ago, an interstellar spacecraft passed through an invisible door 11 billion miles from Earth. After that, it travels another 3 billion miles, still sending home data, which allows scientists to search for space between stars. In a paper Published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, The researchers examined the information that Voyager 1’s plasma wave system found during its voyage, but especially after it crossed the boundary of the Solar System.

The boundary is a chaotic “edge” where the influence of the sun disappears and the interstellar medium begins. The medium is generally described as empty, void, and dark, but the PWS in Voyager 1 found a low and stable pattern against its detector, with space raindrops falling synchronously on a window. Those droplets refer to plasma waves – or interstellar gas – that are the spacecraft’s constant constant.

“We are finding a dim and stable hum of interstellar gas,” said Stella Koch Ocker, a doctoral student at Cornell University who led the research. “It’s very dim and monotone because it’s in the narrow frequency bandwidth.”

For about a billion miles, Voyager 1 could hear the monotone drone, and researchers believe that these weak plasma waves are different from other finds found in the vacuum of interstellar space. For example, sometimes the sun goes crazy and explodes and spits particles into space. James Cordes, an astronomer at Cornell, said the explosion had a characteristic similar to that of a lightning bolt.

These bursts were once used to determine the concentration of interstellar plasma, but the low and stable hum shows that Voyager collects a lot of information without solar stimuli. “We now know that we do not need a lucky event involving the sun to measure interstellar plasma,” said Shami Chatterjee, a Cornell-based research scientist and co-author of the paper.

Future missions into interstellar space will help clarify what is happening there – and NASA Plans for such a mission in the 2030s.

Voyager 1 has a sister probe, Voyager 2, which travels in another direction from the Solar System. Voyager II only roamed the space when it was upgraded to one of the Deep Space Network’s communications resources in 2020. In November, We pinged the spacecraft for the first time in eight months Luckily, it gave back a “hello”.

The pair were launched in August and September 1977 and have been moving away from Earth ever since. Voyager 2 Released from the Solar System in 2018 At a completely different point to Voyager. Crossing enabled Researchers to find out more about heliosphere, The giant, protective bubble of the solar wind that surrounds the solar system.

Follow The Senate 2021 space calendar To keep up to date with all the latest space news of the year. You can add it to your own Google Calendar.