On this day in 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 on a grand tour of the solar system!
Along its journey, it made groundbreaking discoveries about the gas giants and has since ventured beyond the solar system, continuing to explore the mysterious interstellar space.
During its travels, Voyager 1 made some awesome discoveries.
When it flew by the giant planet Jupiter in 1979, it found a thin ring circling the planet and spotted two new tiny moons named Thebe and Metis.
Then, in 1980, Voyager 1 visited the ringed planet Saturn and uncovered even more secrets!
It found a new ringlet called the G-ring and three little "shepherd" moons — Prometheus, Pandora and Atlas — that help keep Saturn's rings in place.
After finishing its planetary mission, the intrepid Voyager 1 just kept going and going.
In 1998, it became the farthest human-made object from Earth.
Today, it is now located more than 23 billion kilometers from Earth, outside the solar system.
𝗪𝗛𝗬 𝗗𝗢𝗘𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗦 𝗠𝗔𝗧𝗧𝗘𝗥?
Voyager 1 a pioneering spacecraft that provided groundbreaking data on Jupiter and Saturn, became the first to enter interstellar space in 2012, and remains the most distant human-made object.
It also carries a golden record as a message to extraterrestrial life.
Hopefully Voyager 1 can survive until later. In this 2025, Voyager 1 has been at a distance of 25.0 billion kilometers from Earth and will continue to fly away until later even when contact with Earth is lost in about 2036. It is the most distant human-made object from Earth.
In 1977, the Voyager probes sped out from Earth in different directions, but both have since left the solar system, and entered interstellar space, pushing through a region known as the Heliopause, a bow shock caused by our own sun's emissions hitting upon the interstellar medium, and creating a bubble around our Sun that protects us from much of the charged particles that zip around our galaxy (known as the heliosphere).
Voyagers arrived at this point around 122 AU, but despite this there is still conjecture to what shape this heliosphere takes.
The most common assertion is that it's a tear shaped sphere, although some theories predict a two tailed object.
Interstellar space isn't so good for humans, in that there is no shielding from charged particles that zip about and destroy cells, but no two areas of interstellar space are the same, and our Sun is about to leave the one it's sat in for millions of years, and enter a new one.
In 2,000 years from now, our Sun will enter the G-cloud, and astronomers believe it's not too unlike the local interstellar cloud, but what they don't know is, what happens as it passes between the two.
These bubbles in space have been carved out from ancient supernova, that have both salted the environment with a rich array of elements, but more so, the shock wave pushes back others, leaving these bubbles of different density and make up.
A more dense area may push back on the Heliosphere, pushing it back towards the planets and exposing Earth to far more of those dangerous charged particles causing a higher rate of mutation here on Earth, less density will have the opposite effect, pushing the bubble further out and making the further out planets less exposed as they are today.
One interesting consequence of this is realizing that Earth's history as seen countless different bubbles and different sizes of the heliosphere, millions of years where more radiation caused more mutations, and then periods of more stability as we are in now.
JWST shows these bubbles up beautifully in M74
Nothing stays the same forever, it only feels that way because human existence is so fleeting, but our planet has many stories to tell, and many yet to tell ahead of it.
Source:
As we speed towards a mysterious new bubble of interstellar space, new insights are revealing its exotic chemistry, strange waves and vast b
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