VOYAGER 1 PICKS UP STRANGE ‘HUM’ IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE

Beyond the edge of the solar system, more than 14 billion miles from Earth, a NASA spacecraft has detected a curious and persistent "hum" in interstellar space, Denise Chow reported for NBC News.

The faint but constant vibrations were picked up by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which, after more than four decades journeying deep into the cosmos, is the most distant human-made object in space.

Scientists say the new discovery, published Monday (May 10, 2021) in the journal Nature Astronomy, is providing a unique and never-before-seen glimpse of the interstellar environment — the frontier beyond the reaches of the sun and planets in our cosmic neighborhood.

"Voyager 1 is in an interesting region of space that is outside this thing called the heliosphere, which is the protective bubble that encases all the planets in the solar system," said Stella Ocker, a doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and one of the authors of the new study.

"So, it's really our only tool for directly sampling the nature of interstellar space." Ocker and her colleagues don't yet know what's causing the "hum," but it was measured through ripples of plasma in what's known as the interstellar medium, the hodgepodge of gas, radiation, and particles that make up the space between stars. While it's not an actual audio signal, the faint drone showed up as vibrations in narrow frequency bandwidth, Ocker said.

Our Sun sends out a constant solar wind which creates a bubble in space, known as the heliosphere, Sarah Knapton also reported for The Telegraph of the United Kingdom on May 10, 2021. Scientists say the new discovery will help them understand how this protective bubble is shaped and modified by what is happening outside of the Sun’s reach.

Cornell research scientist Shami Chatterjee said: "We've never had a chance to evaluate it. Now we know we don't need a fortuitous event related to the sun to measure interstellar plasma."

Voyager 1 left Earth carrying a gold record encoded with information about our history, geography, maths, physics, our greatest musical compositions, and even the sound of someone falling in love, in the hope it may be found by an alien civilization.

A second probe, Voyager 2, left Earth 16 days before Voyager 1 but did not get a gravity assist from Jupiter or Saturn and so is moving more slowly. It left the Solar System in 2018. Both the probes are powered using heat from the decay of radioactive material, contained in a device called a radioisotope thermal generator (RTG). Their original five-year lifespans have stretched to 41 years, making Voyager 2 Nasa’s longest-running mission.

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