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Voyager 1 Finds Unexpected Wrinkles At the Edge Of the Solar System
Voyager 1 has been close to the boundary of the solar system for quite a while; we've mentioned that the edge is near a few times before, including an evidently premature report in 2010 that Voyager had reached a distance so far from the sun that it could no longer detect solar winds and another in 2011 that it had reached an "outer shell" of solar influence. It turns out that the boundaries of the solar system are fuzzier than once anticipated; the L.A. Times is reporting that "Toward the end of July 2012, Voyager 1's instruments reported that solar winds had suddenly dropped by half, while the strength of the magnetic field almost doubled, according to the studies. Those values then switched back and forth five times before they became fixed on Aug. 25. Since then, solar winds have all but disappeared, but the direction of the magnetic field has barely budged." Also at Wired, which notes "That's hard to explain because the galaxy's magnetic field is thought to be inclined 60 degrees from the sun's field. No one is entirely sure what's going on. ... [It's] almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun's home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy."
Obligatory XKCD
Unexpected? You didn't think something 4.5 billion years old would have a few wrinkles?
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Well, when my gas needle doesn't move, it doesn't take long for me to realize that the darned thing got stuck. Especially when the cops tap on the window and politely ask why I'm parked on the interstate
The real path to male liberation
Things are going to be very interesting in a few centuries...
Vejur will be back
Maybe its the hardware starting to fail. This thing has been going for 30 years without a reboot, perhaps the sensors are starting to fail. Or maybe the signals are degraded. I mean, it already uses antiquated technology (your cellphone is 1000x more powerful) and nuclear energy is unpredictable.
Really?
Maybe its time to put Voyager to pasture; we can build new, better and faster Voyager III probes running Linux (probably Android) and Solar Wind for propulsion.
Yeah, sure. Cell phones that need rebooting every few days?
Cue the Republitard-creationist onslaught of "this is proof of heaven" in 5..4..3...
Nice straw man.
Now why don't you go find the Wizard of Oz so he can give you a brain.
Better yet, find the Witch so she can set you on fire.
Thought that thing would be long clear of this galaxy by now .How can it get to find anything if it aint neven left the galaxy ?
No. You as a idiottard is quite enough. Symptoms of an idiottard : Android as the answer to everything. Yes, and good luck in building something new and getting where Voyager1 is before the next idiottard says your probe is outdated and should be replaced by a new shiny probe with a newer android system. BTW : these probes are built to last and withstand the most extreme conditions, not your Samsung Android plastic junk.
They have all properties but one thing? Can't we at least also exclude that the solar winds turned into chicken nuggets?
It's official, Voyager has hit the map boundary and is hitting the clipping wall! The Matrix is real!
She'll need cheat codes to go any further, but what is the point? There's just an endless free fall void out there! Well, maybe it'll find some unfinished part of the map that got abandoned. That would be cool.
I'm sure religion will find a way to deal. Talking in vague code is humanity's best available toolset to make our limited reasoning seem more important and profound. Like how the pain of labor was caused by an Apple "of sin", even though everyone knows how much the glans resembles an apple...no that's just too obvious and mundane of an explanation....next up, Lolordz CREATED the heavan and the earth, and failed to mention the other tinkering going on. But he didst so because it was not our place in the house of the Lolordz.
The real path to male liberation
voyager has reached the edge of the petri dish.....
Maybe its time to put Voyager to pasture; we can build new, better and faster Voyager III probes running Linux (probably Android) and Solar Wind for propulsion.
I would skip a few probes and go straight for Voyager 6. But be careful not to lose the "transmit data" command on some forgotten tape, or we're all screwed.
Ezekiel 23:20
you are an idiot. sure we have more powerful tech now, but a cell phone is not hardened tech. The more a computer can do, the more bugs it can have. As for your flaimbait at the end, well your and idiot
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Someone else (who I think I saw here on Slashdot the last time Voyager was mentioned) had a great analogy for what we're likely seeing. I can't take credit for this at all, but I think it makes a lot of sense.
Suppose we're a small probe, making our way off an island, down the beach, and into the ocean. All we have is a wind-speed detector, and a water detector. As we near the water, waves start lapping over us. When they do, our wind-speed detector says "no wind", and our water detector says "we're wet." Have we entered the ocean yet? The answer is "not quite, but we're really darn close."
It doesn't seem surprising to me at all that the boundary neither perfectly uniform, nor stationary in time. I think we'll be in this transition band for a while.
Program Intellivision!
We are but observers of a universe that doesn't talk. A comment in a previous article put it best (paraphrasing): I hope it smashes into a wall to leave us guessing.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
As for your flaimbait at the end, well your and idiot
LOL! I love the irony. Also, I'd have never seen the AC's comment if you guys hadn't pointed to it.
I don't understand why they're so surprised at this. The sun's radiation and magnetic field isn't stationary, why would the position of the heliopause be? Seems to me that an abrupt transition or an evenly distributed transition would be surprising.
Free Martian Whores!
Motor skills are controlled from the back of the brain, not from the front.
everyone knows how much the glans resembles an apple
Dude, get that checked out by a Doctor, seriously, that sounds problematic.
You do realize that, until very recently, all these creationists were split rather equally between both dems and reps. (The gay marriage and abortion issue pushed white evangelists into the Reps side.) The black population is over 50% creationist (and 90+ are dems) and almost 50% of those who classify themselves as liberal are creationists.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/who-are-the-creationists-by-the-numbers/#.UdBCoDu1H4s
Another thing to think about is that all creationists are not the same. There are they young earthers as well as those who accept that the earth is billions of years old but who think that God created life (and accept minor evolutionary change).
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Voyager simply reached the walls of the dome that encloses our world.
I'm happy that there is still an active remnant of the "cock & balls" NASA out there that is still exploring our universe and showing the world how it's done.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Stop breathing our air more on.
pretty amazing that Voyager 1 is still sending scientific data back to earth. wow. didn't realize that the fuel on board can last so long.
How do we know it is the same magnetic field affecting V I?
Ahh, so that's why the Donkey Punch is so effective.
So, scientifically speaking, maybe it's more like our Sun is just delivering a series of donkey punches to the Voyager?
If this is the Matrix anyone would know that an software entity outside the program boundaries would SEGFAULT instead of traveling on a void. If the universe crashes with a blue screen (unlikely, because probably the universe runs on Linux), blame these NASA scientists.
Perhaps the assumption that the orientation of the magnetic field would change, is wrong?
Be sure to the subject line on posters...!
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
It just stopped moving one day.
Then my theory that we are just a form of entertainment like The Truman Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/ to another form of life.
The center of the galaxy being the direction source is about as intuitive of an answer as saying a fire hose at the center of a hurricane is why you see rain coming from one direction when you are hundreds of kilometers away from the center. In other words, it would be the exact opposite of intuitive, considering such particles wouldn't make it here even if the galactic magnetic field were many, many times weaker than we thought.
IIUC, Voyager I has long outlasted it's expected lifetime. (But I don't think that this looks like equipment failure. It's just that that's not a stupid argument.)
FWIW, I'm not sure that we can currently build things as durable as Voyager was. The circuits have gotten smaller, faster, and less power hungry...but that's not the same as durable at all. If you want durable there's a lot to be said for thick leads, e.g. And we haven't been keeping our skills up in that area. (Anything local and it's cheaper to replace it with something smaller and faster that does the same job with less power drain.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You left out the Deists, who believe that God created the universe and left it to evolve. (IIRC they never actually said that God created life, and they didn't talk about evolution, but then they were prominent before Darwin.)
OTOH, I'm not sure how many Diests are around anymore.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
These are incredibly weak influences that require unimaginable distances to have a cumulative effect. Like gas clouds that are essentially 99.9999% the same as "empty" space, but over tens of millions of miles you build up a black wall like a pointillist painting.
We are ants with a theory of 10 foot waves, and then are shocked to see one isn't glass smooth to the widh of our little foot.
tl;dr Shit be swirlin yo.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Any chance we are measuring hydrogen density that far out? Would be nice to know how well a bussard ramjet might work.
It reminds me of my kids:
Kids: "Are we there yet?"
Me: "No."
Kids: "Are we there yet?"
Me: "No! Stop asking!"
Kids: "Are we there yet?"
Me: "I don't know, we are hell fucking lost!"
Kids: "Dad, you shouldn't cuss."
Me: "Shuddup! I'm trying to concentrate!"
Table-ized A.I.
Reached the edge of the simulation?
-- Only information exists, the rest is just smoke and mirrors.
So you're telling me there's wrinkles outside Uranus ?
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
Have gnu, will travel.
You must be joking. Why on earth would you use a complicated OS like Linux for something that just has to do one very particular job? And then have some hacker take control of it because they found a vulnerability in one of the services the probe was never intended to use anyway? Or the software crash because of some mysterious bug in some library written by some guy in his parents' basement 10 years ago?
I remember video players (tapes, early discs) that would start playing pretty much immediately after you switched them on. Nowadays, you switch on a DVD/blueray player and you get "Welcome" for about 20 seconds. Then the thing crashes every now and then so it needs a reboot. Yep, it's running some flavor of Linux. If you need reliability and efficiency, I'll take 70's technology any time.
Just program the thing directly for whatever it needs to do, using proprietary code. The code will be 1% the size and a lot more efficient.
(Not that I don't like Linux, by the way. It's great for general purpose equipment where you might actually need all of those capabilities)
Perhaps the solar system is simulated and Voyager 1 just reached the edge of this simulation LOL
As for your flaimbait at the end, well your and idiot
LOL! I love the irony.
It's not really irony; this is a well known (if silly) meme.
you do realize that you're full of shit? +3 Informative is extremely generous.
A creationist is a creationist. Period. Stop propagating your crap.
Well, I understand your point but there are levels of ignoring evidence. Science does not disprove the existence of God but I think < /sarc> that science has proved that the earth is just a wee bit older than 10,000 years.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I'm an atheist so I'm not shilling for creationists of any stripe. There are levels of ignorance and faith and equating a young earther with a deist or someone who believes that God stepped in creating life and man doesn't help things as well as makes for an inaccurate evaluation of the situation.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
"?Hardware failure" was my first thought, too. It's done well, but everything decays eventually. Maybe it has reached its 'eventually' point.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Well, I understand your point but there are levels of ignoring evidence. Science does not disprove the existence of God but I think that science has proved that the earth is just a wee bit older than 10,000 years.
Yes, there is unquestionable evidence for the world being much older, just as there is unquestionable evidence for an evolution that wasn't designed by any rational or compassionate being. Appendix, wisdom teeth, a retina where the nerves endings are on the wrong side and makes it harder to see, exposed nerves, reflexes that makes people sneeze against the sun - I could go on and on, and that's just for humans! There are just so many errors and design flaws that claiming there's been any creator involved seems ridiculous and requires strong evidence.
Science can certainly not disprove a deity, but the evidence is strong for none being involved during our evolution. Seen from a freethinking point of view, it's about as preposterous to claim that we were created as the earth being 6000 years young. There's really no big degree of difference between the two, seen from the outside.
OTOH, I'm not sure how many Deists are around anymore.
I think they mostly became atheists, that the universe existed entirely without some form of divine creator was too radical for the time. But in practice it means exactly the same, if there's no god or an absent god there's no point in churches, priests or prayers, no heaven or hell, either way there's simply no point in religion. For all practical intents and purposes a deist lives life exactly like an atheist, probably even more than an agnostic who might hedge their bets and not offend god because it might be true. And really here we're heading into foggy territory anyway, Big Bang violates pretty much every law of nature as we know it. God? Nature? Big question mark? Doesn't really matter, if there's no god here and now it's just for the history books.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> this is a well known (if silly) meme.
Never heard of it and it's not a meme. Might as well say "might as well" is a meme. It's a phrase, there's a difference.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's obviously just wild speculation, but magnetic dark matter seems like it might be one possibility.
They hit the edge of the holodeck or matrix, lol.
Maybe they Died off?
woah there, dont start crying! your dumbshit naked lady gold LP record will still reach the Vulcans
Maybe voyager hit a wall like Truman in the Truman Show?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6NNGxVt7h4
This behaviour would seem to fit Dr. Bhat's helical solar system model perfectly.
Secondary theory built on it predicts Voyager can never leave the solar system,
because it's unable to obtain the 70,000 km/hr escape velocity of the Sun-
(or equivalent speed based on the speed which the Sun orbits the galactic center).
HA HA @ NASA (and ilk) for dismissing him as a nutjob and now feigning ignorance.
It's the edge of the simulation that has not been rendered properly yet. Cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Not content with simply being the man-made object to travel farthest from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft recently entered a bizarre new region at the solar system’s edge that has physicists baffled. Their theories don’t predict anything like it.
Dr. Bhat produced a helical model of the solar system in 2008 that explains the current phenomena.
Helical Helix : Solar System a Dynamic Process
http://www.feandft.com/Helical%20Helix%20PDF%20format..pdf
The Newtonian based heliocentric model that is currently being taught assumes that the Sun is stationary.
More recent models based Dr. Bhat's work lend to the necessity of higher velocities to escape solar pull.
The helical models are very eloquent and intuitive when considering that all celestial bodies are in motion.
The following video (while not to scale or exact orientation) is a beautiful visualization of the helical model:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU
(please forgive the youtuber's misleading semantic differences, i.e "vortexs")
Purpose built industrial system. Potentially unreliable data being reported. OMG Stuxnet got to it.
Dude, get that checked out by a Doctor, seriously, that sounds problematic.
Possibly not the one into a blue box, but the holographic one.
I think you'll find a lot of Christians identify closer with that than with any strict or literal interpretation of the Christian creation mythology. This is especially true of scientists who are also religious, having to reconcile their profession with the dogma that comes with their beliefs.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
> this is a well known (if silly) meme.
Never heard of it and it's not a meme. Might as well say "might as well" is a meme. It's a phrase, there's a difference.
Yeah, it's a meme, you fucking retard. Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't make it untrue. Look it up like you should have in the first place (before you typed your retarded response).
70,000 km/hr at what location? There is no singular escape velocity for the Sun, there is an escape velocity for a given distance from the Sun. Current Voyager I is going more than 4 times the escape velocity at its current location. If you are saying the escape velocity from, say Earth in reference to the Sun, is 70,000 kph, then Voyager I is already going faster than the equivalent at its location. If you are saying the escape velocity at Voyager I's location is that value, then that represents a massive change in the gravitational potential compared to Newton's gravity and the planets would not be in the orbits we see them in with such a change.
It doesn't have to be proprietary - the only thing that gets you is privacy. Other than that - I'd have to agree with you!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Strong magnetic field to make sure nothing spaceship-like can leave the solar system. It's part of the aliens cage to keep us violent humans quarantined in the solar system forever. Wait till it gets to the edge of that foyer and hits the bars on the door! :-)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Also the RTG has a half-life of 87 years. It has been going for about 36 years. Wiki says it will have enough power until 2025. Though it seems that the power will drop, and at what point certain systems start failing and which they are isn't clear. If the transmitter stops, it might as well be dead. So with about 12 years left it can travel about another 6,445,337,920 km before the lights turn off. A relatively short distance.
Of course it will still keep going (unless it hits something) after that. We just won't hear about it (unless it hits an advanced alien civilization with anger issues who doesn't appreciate us flinging our junk at them).