NASA’s Voyager 1 probe hears a hum at 23 billion kilometers from Earth

The NASA probe has been exploring interstellar space for nine years. Now the Voyager was picking up quite a buzz around 23 billion kilometers away.

44 years ago, NASA launched the Voyager 1 space probe from Cape Canaveral Space Port in the direction of space to explore interstellar space, that is, the distant space of a galaxy. It got there in August 2017 and is now about 23 billion kilometers from Earth. And the probe, which was as distant as anything man-made before, is still sending data.

Voyager 1 instruments are now picking up sound outside the boundaries of the solar system. “We detected a faint, continuous buzz of interstellar gas,” Stella Koch-Auker, a PhD student in astronomy at Cornell University, says in the online journal. Natural Astronomy Quoted. It takes 21 hours for the data to reach Earth.

Hum in interstellar space: Data from NASA’s probe takes 21 hours to reach Earth

The resonance is very weak and has been transmitted to Earth by the probe in “narrow bandwidth”. According to the scientists, the tinnitus was so weak that it would not be heard without modification.

When Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, the scales detected interference in the interstellar medium, which is mainly made of hydrogen and plasma. This is generated by the solar wind. He heard a steady hum between the interventions.

The Voyager data should help 1: How is the heliosphere formed?

Lead author James Cordes spoke of “light rain” of signals after the probe had previously recorded sequences of solar storms, comparing them to lightning in thunderstorms on Earth. The researchers hypothesize that there are more rest phases and low-threshold activity in the interstellar gas than previously assumed. Other researchers have also been able to observe something unprecedented: a violent collision between two black holes.

Additionally, scientists have found that interstellar plasma measurements are also possible without a special event from the Sun. They also hope to find out how the heliosphere, the plasma bubble, was formed in the solar system. The Nobel Prize winner believes that another world existed before ours. (Metric tons)