12 ms·
NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- b112 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Spheres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Spheres Made me think of this Brin book. The first ship to try to leave the solar system, crashes into an invisible crystal barrier. It's unbreakable.
- CamperBob2 1y agoI'm confused. The plot summary talks about an impenetrable sphere around our solar system, but also says, "The main character takes part in an expedition to a newly discovered habitable solar system with a shattered sphere." How'd the character escape from our own system?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- graemep 1y agoUnbreakable from outside.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoSays it right here: > From studying the Nataral's artifacts and writings, they learn that the only way to break the crystal spheres is from the inside. He just had to go to the other solar system to learn how to go to the other solar system.
- throwawayffffas 1y ago> It is also discovered that the Nataral chose to go into a kind of suspended animation around a black hole, joining two even earlier species, to wait for the other civilizations of the universe to develop interstellar flight capabilities. They used their interstellar flight capabilities to go wait for someone in the universe to develop interstellar flight capabilities. Checks out.
- clort 1y agoIf I recall (its been 25+ years and my copy is in storage), they went there to wait for other civilisations to develop. They were truly early life and there was literally nobody else and they determined that they would be waiting for millions of years, if not billions. I don't know if it was this book, but the 'suspended animation' was basically pushing several large stars and neutron stars close enough together that the flat space between them was inside an encompassing event horizon, and there they waited, living their lives at an extremely slow (compared to the outside universe) pace.
- pulvinar 1y agoIt crashes into the sphere, but must have also broken it: "the only way to break the crystal spheres is from the inside".
- throwawayffffas 1y agoYeah found it online, the ship that crashed on it broke it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- IAmBroom 1y agoWhile in the very-much-breakable sphere around Earth category, there's Unsong (https://unsongbook.com https://unsongbook.com) by Scott Alexander.
- oconnore 1y agoPerhaps change the link to the original NASA JPL post: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/voyager-2-illuminates-boundary-of-interstellar-space/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/voyager-2-illuminates-boundary...
- world2vec 1y agoSeems I no longer can edit it but that link doesn't directly reference the high temperature environment, unless I misread it?
- mlhpdx 1y agoIt’s very odd to think of something extremely hot but with almost no density, and therefore very little heat transfer.
- jordanb 1y agoThat's actually most of space. Space is a very hot environment, especially where we are so close to the sun. Think about it. When you stand outside in the sun you heat up. All that heat is coming from the sun. But a lot of it was filtered by the atmosphere, so if you're in space near earth it will be hotter than standing at the equator on a sunny day, in terms of radiation. Then there's the fact that heat is very difficult to get rid of when in space. The ISS's radiators are much bigger than its solar panels. If you wanted to have a very-long eva spacesuit you'd have to have radiators much bigger than your body hanging off of it. Short evas are handled by starting the eva with cold liquids in the suit and letting them heat up. All of the mockups of starships going to Mars mostly fail to represent where they're going to put the radiators to get rid of all the excess heat.
- cma 1y agoBut boiling water is just a few hundred Kelvin, this is tens of thousands. Would EVA spacesuits be able to radiate that much away if it was really that hot but for the atmosphere absorbing some? I know it is much hotter, but that's way way hotter and they only find it at a "wall" way farther out. This is more the temperature of the solar wind, dwarfing the steady state temperature you'd reach from the photonic solar radiation at any distance. The Sun's blackbody varies from like 5000K to 7000K, you won't see objects heated in the solar system heated higher than that even with full reflectors covering the field of view of the rear with more sun and being near the surface of the sun, other than a tiny amount higher from stellar wind, tidal friction, or nuclear radiation from the object's own material I don't think.
- foxyv 1y ago> Would EVA spacesuits be able to radiate that much away if it was really that hot but for the atmosphere absorbing some? Yes! The tiny number of particles are moving really fast, but there are very few of them. We are talking about vacuum that is less than 10^-17 torr. A thermos is about 10^-4 torr. The LHC only gets down to 10^-10 torr. At those pressures you can lower the temperature of a kilometer cube by 10 thousand kelvin by raising the temperature of a cubic centimeter of water by 1 kelvin. There is very little thermal mass in such a vacuum which is why temperature can swing to such wild levels. This is also why spacecraft have to reject heat purely using radiation. Typically you heat up a panel with a lot of surface area using a heat pump and dump the energy into space as infrared. Some cooling paints on roofing do this at night which is kind of neat.
- kibwen 1y agoWhat sensor is Voyager using to measure "temperature" here?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ynac 1y agohttps://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/spacecraft/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/spacecraft/ It seems they use several tools - inferring from the descriptions, they can measure and compare the data when it gets back here to determine simple things like temps.
- dotancohen 1y agoIs it possible that one of the sensors failed, thus giving the impression of a sudden change in value?
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoTFA states that Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 found the same thing and that the data aligns in space too.
- dotancohen 1y agoThank you
- imchillyb 1y agoThey're using Plasma Wave Sensor instrumentation: > https://space.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-wave/voyager/ https://space.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-wave/voyager/
- acc_297 1y agoIn both Edge and Firefox I'm blocked for using Adblock but from what I can tell I do not have adblock on either browser.
- danjc 1y agoWhich side of the wall were you on?
- redundantly 1y agoThis made me giggle
- righthand 1y agoFirefox has enhanced tracking protection and I got through fine with it set to “strict”. Are you on a vpn?
- acc_297 1y agoAh yes, I turned off a bunch of Kaspersky internet security settings and I'm through. This is my work computer I forget what's running in the background sometimes.
- jlarocco 1y agoThat's funny... I'm using Firefox, definitely have an ad-blocker, and had no problem.
- righthand 1y agoVery cool, our solar system has an atmosphere, which seems obvious but isn’t discussed or taught at least when I was in high school.
- IAmBroom 1y agoBasically, the Oort cloud. Except for the high temps, which are the surprise.
- hotpocket777 1y agoWell, not a surprise. They predicted it before measuring it.
- righthand 1y agoFrom my understanding the wall is not the Oort cloud but instead the solar winds bouncing off the exterior winds more like how the Pacific and Atlantic oceans don’t mix.
- knappe 1y agoOne of my favorite quotes from one of my Astro professors is "Everything has an atmosphere, it is a matter of how tenuous". I think the article shows how relevant this still is today.
- pndy 1y agoYou may find this article on wikipedia interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere?useskin=vector
- cooper_ganglia 1y agoI remember being in school in 2006 and being told that outside of our solar system is a "wall of fire" that we would never be able to cross. I don't know if any of this info was speculated at that point in time, but it turns out that teacher was at least partially correct!
- relaxing 1y agoThat’s weird. What class was it and what was their motivation for telling you this?
- jordanb 1y agoProbably true, in that if you try to travel interstellar distances you'll going to have to deal with very hot particles hitting your ship on occasion. If you travel slowly the more time you're going to be spend getting hit by high energy particles. If you try to travel quickly you're going to have to deal with more relatively high energy particles. It's potentially enough to make interstellar travel impossible.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIt's impossible for many reasons unless there are physics we haven't discovered yet. To me that's the simple answer for the Fermi paradox.
- andrewflnr 1y agoThe Fermi paradox doesn't require travel, though. The lack of any sign of life at all is still surprising (no radio signals, etc), even if we knew it couldn't physically come here.
- flatline 1y agoIt would take a lot of power to send even a radio signal that could be picked out from the noise at a few light years. Add a requirement for that signal to be more or less continuous over geologic timescales - we’ve only been able to emit and detect these for ~100 years - and my personal surprise diminishes rapidly. Huge distances in time and space with human-level technology make detection highly unlikely.
- jakeydus 1y agoThought this was an interesting example of reading the headline vs reading the article. Headline: > NASA's Voyager found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall"... Article: > While not a hard edge, or a "wall" as it has sometimes been called...
- stuff4ben 1y agoFascinating that we're still getting useful science out of almost 50 year old tech. I think New Horizons is the only other probe that's expected to go interstellar.
- ElijahLynn 1y ago"While not a hard edge, or a "wall" as it has sometimes been called, here both spacecraft measured temperatures of 30,000-50,000 kelvin (54,000-90,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which is why it is sometimes also referred to as a "wall of fire". The craft survived the wall as, though the particles they measured were extremely energetic, the chances of collision in this particle-sparse region of space are so low that not enough heat could be transferred to the duo."
- dogma1138 1y agoIs there a chance this is an instrument error? Seems a strange phenomenon.
- echelon 1y agoI'm just a layperson, but I'd suspect the research is sound. I hate the telephone tag, livescience.com-type journalism. Instead, I'd love to read an abstract and methods. The research must talk about this in detail and explain how the conclusions are reached. It probably isn't too inaccessible. I suspect that there may be many such measurements correlated between both probes taken against some other baseline signal or an observed return to the mean.
- gmueckl 1y agoThis isn't strange at all, but rather an artifact of the nature of heat energy in a medium. Heat is the uncorrelated movement of particles that evens out to zero effective velocity. Temperature is the measure of the velocity magnitude of these individual particles. This is independent of the medium's density.
- koolala 1y agoThat's the best part of them sending two of them. It can't be a random error.
- archermarks 1y agoAlso, worth noting that these temperatures are not that high as far as plasmas go. This is 3-5 eV, which is firmly in the "low temperature" regime (like a fluorescent bulb).
- LeratoAustini 1y agoI often think about how cold our lifeforms on earth are, relative to temperatures of things in the universe. 0 Kelvin is theoretical lowest possible temp, quasars are apparently > 10 trillion Kelvin (10,000,000,000,000K), yet all life we know of is between what, 250K and 400K?
- steve_adams_86 1y agoI was aware of this, but you putting it into numerical terms rather than an intuitive understanding is really cool. Even a small fire is dramatically hotter than life, yet nothing in comparison to what happens outside of our relatively frozen little bubble here on Earth
- robin_reala 1y ago0 Kelvin is theoretical lowest possible temp Let me introduce you to negative temperature systems! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature
- Sniffnoy 1y agoNegative temperatures are hotter than positive temperatures, though, so this isn't really relevant to the parent comment.
- Sniffnoy 1y agoBasically it's because the relevant structures are somewhat fragile. Matt Strassler has a good post about "why does everything we care about move so slowly compared to the cosmic speed limit?" (https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/03/why-is-the-speed-of-light-so-fast-part-2/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/03/why-is-the-speed-of...), and the answer is, it's because we're made of atoms, atoms are held together by the electromagenetic force, and that's only so strong, if things moved way faster then collisions would tear atoms apart. But of course life is dependent not only on atoms, but also on electromagnetic bonds much weaker than the ones that hold atoms together. So this limits how hot it can get.
- httpz 1y ago
- TheBigSalad 1y agoCan someone explain to me why this isn't melting Voyager?
- Terr_ 1y agoThe average stuff is very hot, but there's also basically no stuff out there anyway, so you won't run into enough of it to care. Imagine that there is one venomous and aggressive snake (in a cute little survival-suit) in some random spot in Antarctica. This means "the average snake in Antarctica" is ultra-dangerous. But there's only one, and it's almost impossible for you ever to meet, so in practical terms it's still safer than Australia. :p
- robin_reala 1y agoThe craft survived the wall as, though the particles they measured were extremely energetic, the chances of collision in this particle-sparse region of space are so low that not enough heat could be transferred to the duo. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of a particle, so they can be both extremely hot and extremely diffuse.
- threeducks 1y ago> why this isn't melting Voyager? Same reason why you can sit in a sauna with very hot air or pass your hand through a flame quickly without severe burns. Low density matter does not transfer heat very well. And space is especially devoid of matter.
- spiritplumber 1y agoHigh temperature, almost no actual heat because there are very few particles.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mystified5016 1y agoBecause very few hot particles ever touched the craft. The gas is so incredibly thin that Voyager largely sailed straight through the space in between molecules.
- flippyhead 1y agoThis is obviously the thing aliens have setup to obscure themselves from us. Obviously.
- anigbrowl 1y agoIt's great that we're still getting data from these two probes 50 years later but it absolutely sucks that these are the only 2 probes we have out there. How long can they keep running, another 5 or 10 years max? It's already considered an engineering miracle that they are still going. What of people growing up 10, 20, 30 years from now? They'll be taught in school about stuff from Voyager and then told 'and that was what we learned in the golden age of space exploration, which ended long before you were born because we couldn't be bothered to keep at it.' Having grown up in the 70s, I feel somewhat betrayed that we just just gave up on doing moon stuff, rendering a whole generation's aspirations on space exploration into a lie. The claims that 'there is nothing more to discover up/out there' is nonsense, much like the claims that 'chips can't be made any smaller' that I would hear back in the 32nm period. The lack of long-term commitment to exploratory space is a terrible waste. To be sure we have been doing some stuff in system, but if he had kept putting out deep space probes every few years with more advanced instruments we would have learned a lot of other things by now, and we would have a long-term stream of new data coming in for the future. Now arguments for launching more deep space probes are dismissed with 'it'll take decades before we get anything useful back.' Yeah, because we stopped iterating! Meantime allowing that sort of exploration to become anachronistic is one reason we are overrun with flat-earthers and other science woo even at the highest levels of government.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoVoyager of course took advantage of an alignment of the planets in order to perform the Grand Tour. Apparently it's 175 years before it happens again, FWIW. I suppose an extra-solar-system probe though would simply need some gravitational slingshotting and not necessarily visit many of the outer planets. I suppose that changes the time scale.
- floxy 1y agoSolar sails for the near term: https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=AzuL-NZ6JYJ71Rpj&t=883 https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=AzuL-NZ6JYJ71Rpj&t=883 ...which might get up to 22 AU per year. And then in the future: laser-pushed light sails: https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24/items/wikipedia-scholarly-sources-corpus/10.2514.zip&file=10.2514%252F3.8632.pdf https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
- 1970-01-01 1y agoWhat happens when an object enters a solar orbit inside this wall? Theoretically, it could be heated to life-sustaining temperatures?
- IAmBroom 1y agoWell, that's what happens on Earth, so technically 'yes'. But if you mean "as soon as it enters", no.
- whycome 1y ago30K to 50K K? K. It’s not clear what the range represents. Were they polling and those are max and min values they got? Was that their range of uncertainty because it’s hard to accurately measure there? Also, I hate the ambiguity of a title that references “Voyager Spacecraft” so it’s unclear if it was one or both.
- Y_Y 1y agoSmall k for kilo-, big K for kelvin. I skimmed the links that TFA provided and couldn't find the source of that figure. With rare space plasmas near shocks it's typical to have non-thermal distributions where the temperature isn't well defined. I don't think it's anything to get to excited about without having a proper article from NASA instead of IFL slop.
- whycome 1y agoSo it's more the temperature range uncertainty? is that a product of the environment (and with few particles one can actually measure) or a product of the measurement apparatus?
- Karawebnetwork 1y agoFirst paragraph of the article: "In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager probes to study the Solar System's edge, and the interstellar medium between the stars. One by one, they both hit the "wall of fire" at the boundaries of our home system, measuring temperatures of 30,000-50,000 kelvin (54,000-90,000 degrees Fahrenheit) on their passage through it."
- whycome 1y agoThat paragraph is the problem. It doesn't actually explain it. Were they continuously polling temps and reached as low as 30K and as high as 50K? If the 'wall of fire' is based on temps, did they have a continuous rise? what was the temp just outside the 'wall'?
- floxy 1y agoAre the particle velocities that are being measure correlated at all? As in, flowing away from the sun or similar? I'd think that something with a well-defined "temperature" would be composed of randomly moving particles with a mean velocity of zero. I'd also be interested in the distribution of particle speeds. Would anyone one consider a collimated beam of neutrons to have a temperature? And I wonder what the distance mean free path length is. I suppose that must be pretty large. So that the T^4 Boltzmann radiation law doesn't really apply to these ~40,000 Kelvin temperatures? Or maybe the emissivity of hard vacuum is really low? I guess I've never thought about it before.
- westurner 1y agoIs it that there is not enough mass beyond the 30k-50k Kelvin wall at the edge of the solar system to attract away things with mass that can carry thermal energy; that thermal mass clumps in the well around the edges and only wisps away, or is that a sidewall boundary of a black hole? Where is Planet X in relation to said wall of energy density? Said wall is only sampled by the Voyager probes with a few exit trajectories? Does said thermal wall extend all the way around the solar system, or is it mostly on one side of the sun; is it a directional coronal wake? Is there symmetry in said thermal wall around the trajectory of the sun? Is this better explained with SQR Superfluid Quantum Relativity? Are there other phases of matter at those temperatures? From the article: > "As the heliosphere plows through interstellar space, a bow shock forms, similar to what forms as a ship plowing through the ocean So fluidic space wind and fluidic nonlinear bow shock wakes. Are there additional heat walls beyond (and probably also before) the first, as there are with more laminar boat wakes? Is there a gravitational wave "bow shock", too? "The Heliosphere" https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/heliosphere-4/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/heliosphere-4/ From "Two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159195 : > "The helical model - our solar system is a vortex" https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU Where are planet X and the heat wall (and/or side wall) in this vortical model of the solar system?
- westurner 1y agoHeliosphere > Heliopause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause The heliopause is due to a balance of pressure between the Ram pressure of the solar wind, and the Total pressure of the interstellar medium. The "pressure" of such fluidic solar and interstellar "wind" is due to n-body gravity or the shape of spacetime.
- sinuhe69 1y ago50 years in deep space and still delivering useful specific data! Whenever I think of the Voyagers, I cannot help being amazed by the engineering efforts of the Voyager team. A true marvel of engineering that will stay unchallenged for a very long time. Most respect to the team!
- high_na_euv 1y agoASML is doing crazy stuff also
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe chip-factory company? Sure, but what has that to do with senior-citizen-aged electronics leaving the Oort cloud?
- high_na_euv 1y agoASML stuff is also insane engineering, so they can challenge them in that category
- Mustafabei 1y agoNot to mention that the systems are still active and responsive, still maintained while being written in FORTRAN.
- mek6800d2 1y agoJust to be clear, the computers onboard the spacecraft are programmed in assembly language--3 types of computers on each spacecraft, so 3 assembly languages. The original ground system was mostly written in Fortran. Mission control (i.e., the thing you see on TV!) ran on IBM 360 mainframes. Offline analysis/design/development activities (e.g., developing observation sequences for planetary encounters) ran on Univac 1108 mainframes. Circa 1990, after Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune, the project began moving off the mainframes onto Unix workstations and the original Fortran software was largely replaced by new software written in C and other languages.
- juliangmp 1y agoOh great yet another website that has the obligatory cookie banner but won't give me a reject all option