scrubbedexpat098

1st man made object to leave our solar system, wow.

Swerv-o

But it will be back, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture...


S

scrubbedexpat098

hee hee, forgot about that, pretty amazing I reckon

carolinephillips

I thought it had left a while ago....

renth

Check this out, I thought this was the one with the picture of the waving man and woman on but apparently that was an earlier one. Voyager 1 has some records and a record player with instructions...

"It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect."

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

Swerv-o

It did, but they have only just confirmed it. They needed some of the readings from V'Ger itself to corroborate where the boundaries of the solar system are.


S

GarryP

Actually, that's probably not true.

It's maybe passed through the heliopause and is feeling interstellar space, but that's akin to saying that the earth system is defined by the magnetopause*, at 38 - 96 thousand km. Problem is the moon is at 385 thousand km - so that definition would put the moon outside the earth system.

The sun has similar - the Oort cloud, out at a light year, which is a better definition of an 'edge' - and Voyager 1 is only 2 thousandths of the way there.



(* the first person to make an XMan joke gets a roll of the eyes and a dose of sarcasm)

renth

Whoa! space is big.

GarryP

Really big.

You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to space.

Listen ...

Bix

Space is indeed a huge and sometimes unfathomable phenomena.

My missus was precisely directing me 1cm to the left, no 2 cm to the right..... and so on. To me the bookcase looked good where it was.

Alfresco

eddie007

Which is why I feel much MUCH safer contemplating my naval.... When I start thinking about dimensions in space no one gets fed and clean clothes doesn't happen.

GarryP

You feel safe contemplating your navel rather than the wonders of the universe and the insignificance of your place in it, do you?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...531_story.html

commonwealth

where does alpha centauri's heliosphere begin?

GarryP

Probably a more interesting question for alpha centauri, given its actually part of a triple star system with orbits for the main pair at roughly the distance of Pluto.

In general their heliopause distances are probably comparable to the sun's, or maybe slightly more (alpha centauri is bigger than the sun). That leaves a lot of space inbetween. If you assume that it has an oort cloud similar to the sun, then you'd have:

<---1 light year---> <--------2 light years --------> <---1 light year --->
Sun ...................... Oort Cloud ................................. Oort Cloud ..............Alpha Centauri

Or maybe the 2 light year space between the edges of the cloud are filled with such debris where the gravitational binding gradually switches between star systems. Nobody knows.