NASA's Voyager 1 Detects Faint, Persistent Hum Beyond our Solar System
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NASA's Voyager 1 detects faint, monotone hum beyond our solar system:
In a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, researchers examined data beamed back by Voyager 1's Plasma Wave System over its journey, but particularly after it passed through over the solar system's border.
[...] "We're detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas," said Stella Koch Ocker, a doctoral student at Cornell University who lead the research. "It's very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth."
[...] Those bursts were once used to determine the density of interstellar plasma, but this low, constant hum shows Voyager is collecting plenty of information without the solar outbursts. "Now we know we don't need a fortuitous event related to the sun to measure interstellar plasma," said Shami Chatterjee, a research scientist at Cornell and co-author on the paper.
Future missions to interstellar space would help clarify what's happening out there -- and NASA has plans for such a mission, feasibly, in the 2030s.
Journal Reference:
Stella Koch Ocker, James M. Cordes, Shami Chatterjee, et al. Persistent plasma waves in interstellar space detected by Voyager 1, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01363-7)
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