Interstellar

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We live in a bubble—literally. It’s called the heliosphere, and it’s made of tenuous plasma billowing from the sun. This ionized gas flows outward along magnetic field lines emerging from our star, spooling out in radial spirals tied to the sun’s rotation. To venture beyond where this wind wanes against the greater flows of plasma coursing through our galaxy is, in a very real sense, to leave our solar system behind. Yet despite the heliosphere being known and studied since the late 1950s, its hazy boundaries have only…

via Paramount Pictures If you thought Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar makes sense from a scientific standpoint, Neil deGrasse Tyson is here to shatter your illusions about outer space and how it all works. Let’s admit it; though the 2014 flick about humanity’s last stand against a dying world adheres to the rules of science and our understanding of the physical world, the movie is ultimately an exercise in imagination. This becomes apparent by the inclusion of the “fifth dimensional” beings in the movie’s…

When Oumuamua travelled through our Solar System back in 2017, people around the world paid attention. It was the first Interstellar Object (ISO) astronomers had ever identified.Then in August 2019, Comet 2I Borisov travelled through our Solar System, becoming the second ISO to cruise through for a visit. Together, the visiting ISOs generated a wave of inquiry and speculation.There's bound to be more ISOs than just those two, and a new study says our Solar System has probably captured some of these interstellar visitors,…

It’s not uncommon for NASA missions to far outlive their expected lifetimes, and to be granted extensions after achieving their main objectives. The Opportunity Mars rover rolled on for nearly 15 years, rather than three months. The Saturn-focused Cassini orbiter, which NASA operated in collaboration with the European Space Agency, persevered for 20 years instead of four. But the Voyagers surely take the cosmic cake. If the energy-conserving gambit of Dodd’s team works, the two could reach the unprecedented age of 50—with…

A diagram of our heliosphere. For the first time, scientists have mapped the heliopause, which is the boundary between the heliosphere (brown) and interstellar space (dark blue). Credit: NASA/IBEX/Adler PlanetariumNASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX mission, has helped researchers learn something new about the heliosphere – the magnetic bubble created by the Sun that we live in. It turns out, the heliosphere has ripples! These ripples also change – likely due to influences from the Sun itself.The paper…

Voyager 2's demise has been postponed after NASA found a way to hack a backup source of power to keep the probe going until 2026.Voyager 1 and 2 have provided crucial scientific information in their 45 years of spaceflight.Today, the probes are traveling in interstellar space, 12 and 14 billion miles away from Earth. That's further than any spacecraft or human-made object has gone before."The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the sun they go," said Linda Spilker,…

A newly proposed propulsion system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve.The concept, known as 'pellet-beam' propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development earlier this year.To be clear, the concept currently doesn't exist much beyond calculations on paper, so we can't get too excited just yet.Still, it's attracted attention not only because of…

An interstellar object that is currently on its long journey back out of our Solar System has a completely natural explanation, in spite of its odd quirks.The peculiar acceleration of 'Oumuamua, new research confirms, can be fully attributed to the release of molecular hydrogen gas.This, according to astrochemist Jennifer Bergner of the University of California, Berkeley and astrophysicist Darryl Seligman of Cornell University, is further evidence that the cigar-shaped chunk of rock started off as a planet seed before…

Was it an asteroid, comet, or even an alien spaceship? For years, astronomers have been perplexed by ‘Oumuamua, a mysterious object up to 400 meters long that entered the Solar System in 2017. No such object from beyond our Sun’s reaches had visited us before, with this interloper moving so fast it could not be bound to the Sun. ‘Oumuamua, as scientists christened it, was also odd in that it looked like an asteroid but behaved like a comet. Now, a team of…