Voyager 1 detects faint, persistent hum

[guohua]

So.

NASA's Voyager 1 detects faint, persistent hum beyond our solar system

This is interesting,,,, well sort of.
The fact that both Voyager 1 & 2 are operational is amazing.
Small Nuclear power packs works, but they won't mention that.

The farthest spacecraft from Earth, NASA's Voyager 1, said farewell to the solar system almost a decade ago, passing through an invisible door some 11 billion miles from Earth and crossing into interstellar space. Since then, it's tacked on another 3 billion miles and it's still sending data home, allowing scientists to probe the space between stars. 


In a paper, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, researchers examined data beamed back by Voyager 1's Plasma Wave

System (PWS) over its journey, but particularly after it passed through over the solar system's border.
The border is a messy "edge" where the sun's influence disappears and the interstellar medium begins.

The medium is typically characterized as empty, desolate and dark, but the PWS on Voyager 1 has detected a low, constant pattering against its detector, space raindrops gently falling on a window. Those drops signify plasma waves -- or interstellar gas -- is constant company for the spacecraft.
"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."
Source

[Mystic Wanderer]

Voyager 1 and 2 are still operational?  

It boggles my mind trying to figure out how they avoided being destroyed by passing rocks, asteroids, or comets. Is this another one of those stories from NASA that we shouldn't believe?

If true, then this is interesting. As we've read in other threads here, every planet puts off it's own frequency sound. I suppose it's plausible that gas has a sound too. 

[Ninurta]

Voyager 1 and 2 are still operational?  

It boggles my mind trying to figure out how they avoided being destroyed by passing rocks, asteroids, or comets. Is this another one of those stories from NASA that we shouldn't believe?

If true, then this is interesting. As we've read in other threads here, every planet puts off it's own frequency sound. I suppose it's plausible that gas has a sound too. 

They avoided the collisions because space is incredibly empty. It's possible that one or the other could have been taken out by a rogue rock, but the chance is vanishingly tiny given the large volume of space and the small size, relatively speaking, of space rocks.

Almost everything is, in reality, mostly nothing. Even atoms are mostly tiny, tiny packets of energy, imitating solid particles, loosely bound together by invisible atomic level forces in a relatively huge volume of nothingness. Everything you see, the very "solid" ground you walk on, is, in reality, composed mostly of vacuum, or nothingness.

From the article, what the Voyagers are detecting are tiny pings of plasma, superheated pockets of ionized gas at a very tiny volume each, but colliding in a steady stream with their detectors. The constant collisions occur at such a rapid pace they produce a "hum", like rain on a tin roof - except the plasma "rain drops" are far and away tinier than the rain drops we are used to seeing.

The faster one travels through the plasma medium, the higher pitched the hum should become, theoretically, just as a harder rain has a different pitch on a tin roof from a softer, gentler rain. I have to wonder just how fast one would have to be travling before the volume encountered would be sufficient to wear the hull of a spacecraft away, like flying through a giant sand-blaster...

The gentle pressure of the solar wind creates a "bubble" around the solar system, always pushing outward to repel and redirect these tiny plasma packets, to force them to go around rather than through the solar system, sort of like a magnet repelling another magnet through invisible force. The point at which the solar wind becomes too weak to do that, and the force of the invading interstellar medium overcomes the pressure of the solar wind is the "heliopause", and marks the edge of our solar system and the beginning of interstellar space. Voyager, according to the article, is nearly a decade and and 3 billion miles beyond that boundary, and has become a citizen of the galaxy now, renouncing it's solar citizenship by the simple act of crossing that heliopause. Eventually, assuming it is not destroyed in a random collision, it will move beyond the galaxy, and become a citizen of the universe.

Billions of years from now, it may happen that one or the other Voyager craft whizzes through another, alien, solar system. And it may be that an amateur astronomer detects that passage, names it something like "Oumuamua", and wiser heads on that alien planet will argue and speculate endlessly about whether what they saw was an alien spacecraft...

... or just another interstellar space rock.

.

[ABNARTY]

Amazing stuff. They really built those things to last. 

They will probably be chugging along long after we are gone.

[guohua]

Amazing stuff. They really built those things to last. 

They will probably be chugging along long after we are gone.

YUP!
Until Captain Kirk stumbles upon VGER (Voyager).

[ABNARTY]

Amazing stuff. They really built those things to last. 

They will probably be chugging along long after we are gone.

YUP!
Until Captain Kirk stumbles upon VGER (Voyager).

Thought of that too 

[BIAD]

The faster one travels through the plasma medium, the higher pitched the hum should become, theoretically, just as
a harder rain has a different pitch on a tin roof from a softer, gentler rain...

So theoretically, the craft could speed up and slow down, thus creating a tune!
Who knows, years from now a rendition of 'Edelweiss'  or 'Heart & Soul' could come wafting back to Earth!

[guohua]

 A fitting song for Voyager I think.