What does Space feel like 21 billion km away?
- 82newsbulletin
- Sep 16, 2020
- 2 min read
Written by Aditya Gupta
The Voyager Mission spacecrafts were launched in 1977 to go “Where no man has gone before.” The 773 kg scientific phenomena have successfully traversed into the Interstellar Medium, the space between Stars, far away from the gravitational influence of our Solar System. Situated over 21 billion kilometers away, a measly 0.002 light years on the scale of our cosmos, the data they are unceasingly disseminating to Earth is raising revolutionary questions about the vacuum of space.
Everything Astrophysicists know is through the light they collect from Space. Unlike their colleagues, they cannot physical manipulate the objects they want to study and can only draw inferences based on what they observe. The region beyond our solar system, characterized by its desolate darkness, was thought to be an empty vacuum with negligible compelling features.
The Voyager missions have recently debunked these beliefs, showing us that the boundary of our Solar System is more akin to a fierce battle between electromagnetic winds, dust, and a myriad storms of high energy particles. The previously believed to be empty regions are in fact chock full of exciting electromagnetic activity that Astrophysicists can study to understand the formation of our solar system, and the lifecycle of our Sun.
A region known as the “Heliosphere” forms a protective bubble around the Solar System that protects our planet from a sudden and untimely demise. Highly energetic explosions known as Gamma-Ray bursts could instantly end all life on Earth, if we are unlucky enough to be in one’s vicinity. The Heliosphere could provide an explanation for why our planet has been lucky enough to survive this long.
Whatever may be the case, the two car-sized hunks of metal will forever plough through space, proving to humanity how little we know about the Universe we live in.
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