Voyager 1 is just about to leave the solar system. It is currently 10.8bn miles from Earth and has been en route since 1977. It now takes sixteen hours for messages travelling at lightspeed to reach it.
The probe is detecting a change in the particle flow around it and it will soon (in the next four years) be in interstellar space and completely free of the Sun's influence. You can read about it here.
As Douglas Adams said in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
No comments:
Post a Comment