Earth s most distant space probe heard a very strange hum sound tweaktown.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tweaktown.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Voyager 1 hears a plasma hum in deep space
Shane McGlaun - May 11, 2021, 6:21am CDT
Voyager 1 is one of a pair of NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in space, and it’s still working and getting further from home every day. The spacecraft entered interstellar space after exiting our solar system’s heliopause.
A team of researchers led by Cornell recently published a study outlining something new and interesting instruments aboard the spacecraft have detected. According to the team, Voyager 1’s instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas plasma waves. Data scientists working on the project examined traveled back to Earth from 14 billion miles away.
Bad news for anyone suffering from one of those mysterious hums that are occurring around the world with no apparent cause nor obvious way to stop them. If you want to just go to a place where you can’t hear them, be prepared for a long trip – a really loooong trip. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which left Earth in 1977 and left the solar system in 2012, recently picked up a mysterious hum some 14 million miles away from the planet. Does it have enough power left to stick its solar panels inside its audio intakes?
“We find au-scale density fluctuations that trace interstellar turbulence between episodes of previously detected plasma oscillations. Possible mechanisms for the narrowband emission include thermally excited plasma oscillations and quasi-thermal noise, and they could be clarified by new findings from Voyager or a future interstellar mission.”
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A Nasa spacecraft is picking up a strange “hum” outside of our solar system.
Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, as one of a pair of spacecraft launched towards the edge of the solar system, 44 years ago. Its journey has taken it right to the edge and beyond it – and it is now fying through the “interstellar medium” beyond our own Sun’s influence.
Instruments on board the spacecraft that attempt to analyse that interstellar medium have heard a constant drone, which appears to be the noise of the universe beyond our own neighbourhood.
Humans can’t hear sounds in space, but there are sounds waves moving through the rarefied plasma that fills interplanetary and even interstellar space, the gaps between the stars. Now, thanks to Voyager 1, we can say what interstellar gas sounds like: a constant hum.
Voyager 1 is the furthest human-made object from Earth. Since 2012 when it crossed the heliopause and left the Solar System, it has been traveling in interstellar space, giving humanity our first direct observations of what the space between stars is really like. Previous studies of this interstellar plasma focused on shockwaves, some of which were triggered by the Sun. This new study, published in Nature Astronomy, looks at the constant background noise of the plasma waves.