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Category: physics

Faster Computers

Published September 9, 2015

Dilbert-on-quantum-computing

A top Dutch research institute is helping the tech world bring faster computers to market–but we’ll still have to wait more than a decade from now for that to actually happen.

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Solar System Limits

Published June 28, 2013

This story really made my heart stop beating, just for a second. Humankind’s farthest-reaching spacecraft, Voyager 1, is really close to leaving the magnetic field of our sun. What that means is that Voyager 1 is the farthest away from the sun that anything man-made has ever been. An artist had to create his own rendering of the picture.

voyagers

The sun is the dot in the middle of the blue circle. You can imagine Earth being somewhere near that dot. Everything else, all the other colors, represents what else is out there in the Milky Way.

Voyager 1 was launched by NASA, along with its identical twin, Voyager 2, in 1977. Since then, Voyager 1 has made it  11 billion miles away from the sun. Voyager 2, however, wasn’t so lucky. It was the little brother who was born two seconds after his faster one. It’s still going, but it’s only made it nine billion miles away. At the rate they’re both going, Voyager 1 will make it to the finish first, receive all the media attention, and his straggling twin will get a mere mention in the magazines. Scientists aren’t sure whether that finish will happen months or years from now.

While Voyager 1 has been getting closer to edge of the heliosphere, which is defined by the extent of the sun’s magnetic field (the blue circle and everything in it in the drawing above), researchers have only now become certain that it’s definitely on its way to crossing over into interstellar space. Soon. Pretty soon.

Using its on-board charged-particle and magnetometer instruments, Voyager 1 was able to send data back to NASA since 1977 on the movement of cosmic rays, which are the particles, and the magnetic field. The scientists were looking for three signs of the so-called interstellar magnetic highway:

  1. Charged particles disappear, apparently leaving the heliosphere as they zoom out along the solar magnetic field.
  2. Charged particles zoom in, apparently from outside of the heliosphere.
  3. There is an abrupt change in the direction of the magnetic field.
One and two have been reported in Science, but three has yet to be observed. However, two out of three is convincing enough to anticipate Voyager 1 crossing over into where no man-made thing has ever gone before.——————————————————————————–

Burlaga L.F., Ness N.F. & Stone E.C. (2013). Magnetic Field Observations as Voyager 1 Entered the Heliosheath Depletion Region. , Science, DOI:

Krimigis S.M., Decker R.B., Roelof E.C., Hill M.E., Armstrong T.P., Gloeckler G., Hamilton D.C. & Lanzerotti L.J. (2013). Magnetic Field Observations as Voyager 1 Entered the Heliosheath Depletion Region., Science, DOI:

Stone E.C., Cummings A.C., Mcdonald F.B., Heikkila B.C., Lal N. & Webber W.R. (2013). Voyager 1 Observes Low-Energy Galactic Cosmic Rays in a Region Depleted of Heliospheric Ions., Science, DOI:

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