Press Release
At the Solar System’s Edge, More Surprises from NASA’s Voyager
Voyagers in the Heliosheath
This artist's concept shows NASA's two Voyager spacecraft exploring a turbulent region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our sun. After more than 35 years of travel, the two Voyager spacecraft will soon reach interstellar space, which is the space between stars.
Our sun gives off a stream of charged particles that form a bubble around our solar system, known as the heliosphere. The solar wind travels at supersonic speeds until it crosses a shockwave called the termination shock. That part of our solar system is shown in bright blue. Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock in December 2004, and Voyager 2 did so in August 2007. Beyond the termination shock is the heliosheath, shown in gray, where the solar wind dramatically slows down and turns to flow toward the tail of the heliosphere. Outside the heliosphere is territory dominated by the interstellar wind, which is blowing from the left in this image. As the interstellar wind approaches the heliosphere, the interstellar ions are deflected around the outside as indicated by the bright arc.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft continue to provide new insight on the outskirts of our solar system, a frontier thought to be the last that Voyager will cross before becoming the first man-made object to reach interstellar space.
In papers published this week in the journal Science, scientists from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and other Voyager partner institutions provide more clarity on the region they named the “magnetic highway” in December 2012. Cruising through what scientists describe as a curious, unexpected charged-particle environment, Voyager has detected, for the first time, low-energy galactic cosmic rays, now that particles of the same energy from inside the bubble around our sun disappeared. As a result, Voyager now sees the highest level so far of particles from outside our solar bubble that originate from the death of other nearby stars.
“Voyager 1 may be months or years from leaving the solar system — we just don’t know,” says APL’s Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator for Voyager’s Low-Energy Charged Particle (LECP) instrument. “But the wait itself is incredibly exciting, since Voyager continues to defy predictions and change the way we think about this mysterious and wonderful gateway region to the galaxy.”
Voyager 1 at the Galaxy's Edge
Based on data gathered by the Low-Energy Charged Particle (LECP) instrument on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, this figure shows that high-speed (near the speed of light) particles called cosmic rays, originating in the galaxy, are not isotropic — that is, they do not arrive with the same intensity from all directions. The green and red points are cosmic rays moving in the direction perpendicular to the radial direction from the sun and are relatively flat. The black points, however, show large changes and represent particles moving away from and toward the sun. They also happen to be moving perpendicular to the magnetic field, shown by the red line in the pie plot at lower right. If Voyager 1 was free of the sun's influence, all points would fall on the same, flat line.
The measurents are obtained by rotating the detector platform of LECP (inset picture) through eight, 45-degree sectors depicted by the the flywheel inset on the upper left. The stepper motor underneath the platform steps once every 192 seconds; it was tested for 500,000 steps, enough for four years of Voyager's initial mission to Jupiter and Saturn, but has now exceeded 6 million steps over 35-plus years.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 and between them visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Since 1990, the twin spacecraft have been on their Interstellar Mission, on track to leave the heliosphere, which is the bubble of magnetic field and charged particles the sun blows around itself. On Aug. 25, 2012, when Voyager 1 was about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun, the spacecraft reached the so-called magnetic highway where charged particles from inside the heliosphere zoomed out along the magnetic field as cosmic rays from far outside zoomed in. The lack of a detectable change in the direction of that magnetic field, however, convinced scientists that Voyager remained within the sun’s influence.
Transitional Regions at the Heliosphere's Outer Limits
This artist's concept shows NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft exploring a region called the "depletion region" (or "magnetic highway") at the outer limits of our heliosphere, the bubble that the sun blows around itself. In this region, the magnetic field lines generated by our sun (yellow arcs) are piling up and intensifying, and low-energy charged particles that are accelerated in the heliosphere's turbulent outer later (green dots) have disappeared. Scientists think the depletion region is the last region Voyager 1 has to cross before reaching interstellar space, which is the space between stars.
Voyager 1 passed a shockwave known as the termination shock in 2004, where solar wind suddenly slowed down and became turbulent. In 2010, it then passed into an area called the "stagnation region" where the outward velocity of the solar wind slowed to zero and sporadically reversed direction. In the slow-down and stagnation regions, the prevalence of low-energy charged particles from our heliosphere jumped dramatically and is indicated by the green dots. On Aug. 25, 2012, Voyager 1 entered the depletion or magnetic highway region, where the magnetic field acts as a kind of "magnetic highway" allowing energetic ions from inside the heliosphere to escape out, and cosmic rays from interstellar space zoom in. (To learn more about how this region acts as a magnetic highway, click here.)
Magnetic field lines form a spiral around the solar system because of the rotation of the sun (learn more), and at the edge of the heliosphere they form roughly parallel arcs. Because an interstellar wind outside is pushing back on the heliosphere, magnetic field lines pile up as the solar wind slows, like cars back up at a freeway off-ramp. The compression of field lines increases the strength of the magnetic field as Voyager approaches interstellar space.
Because scientists don't know the exact location of the heliopause — which is the border to interstellar space — that area has been labeled with a question mark.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Voyager 1 is 11.6 billion miles (18.6 billion kilometers) from the sun, poised to become Earth’s first robotic ambassador to the space between the stars. At 9.4 billion miles (15.1 billion kilometers), Voyager 2 has seen some gradual changes in the charged particles, yet scientists do not think Voyager 2 has reached the magnetic highway.
The Voyager spacecraft were built and are operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology. The LECP instrument was designed and built at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with NASA funding. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/voyager.
For more on the Low-Energy Charged Particle detector, visit:
http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/VOYAGER/index.html.