Tag Archives: oort cloud

Voyager 2 Is Back Online And Gathering Data Again!

Voyager 2 Is Back Online And Gathering Data Again!

Science & Technology, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,



From the craft itself, to what it is doing in space, to the new information is has discovered, join me as we explore how the Voyager 2 is back online and gathering data again!

Subscribe for more videos:

Space is huge, and because of that, we need help exploring it, even when it’s just exploring our solar system. It took us an incredible amount of time just to find and understand part of what makes our solar system special. From the 9 (not eight!) planets, to the moons of the planets, to the sun, and more. But to really venture into deep space and understand what’s out there, we needed not one, but two probes known as Voyager (enter Star Trek reference here).
Voyager 1 is a probe that humanity sent out to observe the universe at large, and it’s currently well past Pluto and has shown us many things about our solar system. In 2017, it was set at around 138 AU’s from our planet. AU means “Astronomical Unit”, which in this case means the distance from the Earth to the Sun. So 138 AU’s means that it’s 138 times far than the Earth is from the sun right now. That’s a really big number. Over 12 billion miles to be exact. That’s the farthest anything from man has traveled in space.
One of its crowning achievements was a photograph showing a set of sunbeams, and in one of those sunbeams was earth. It was a dot. A dot in a grander scale photograph of our solar system. That’s how small we are in the scale of our system when you look from the outside in, we are a dot. An epic dot, but a dot no doubt.
As for Voyager 2, despite it launching BEFORE Voyager 1 (by 16 days), it was set on a similar mission to explore the solar system. Albeit via a different route that took it past Neptune and Uranus. The point here is that these two probes are the farthest things that humanity has sent into the solar system. They have traveled incredible distances and are still revealing things about our solar system that continue to both boggle the mind and astound us.
Voyager 2 is now in Interstellar Space, a crowning achievement in and of itself. But that doesn’t mean it’s been all smooth sailing, far from it in certain ways In February 2020, it was noted by NASA that something had gone wrong with Voyager 2, and as such they had problems getting it to work properly. Given that the probe is in space that humanity hasn’t touched, and will likely not touch themselves for a long time, this is to be expected. However, a few days after that announcement, they revealed to the world that they had stabilized the problems on the craft and got it back up and working.
But what exactly caused the problems of the probe? Well, that would be a failed maneuver. Voyager 2 was supposed to do a rotation move that would shut off some of its instruments and thus conserve power. However, for whatever reason, the probe didn’t do it, and because of that, the scientific instruments that were on at the time…remained on…which made it so that the probe eventually shut down prematurely.
Not something you want to happen in the reaches of interstellar space when ANYTHING can happen in the blink of an eye.
This failure could’ve been catastrophic, because you see, to ensure that the probe would have a long life in space, it was given the bare essentials in many aspects, including its power supply. Believe it or not, despite being in space for over 42 years the Voyager 2 doesn’t have the biggest power supply, it actually uses radioactive fuel to produce heat, and thus power. But to conserve that power, it shuts off non-essential systems when it’s not using them.
So for the move to fail caused a serious drain in power, and likely sent NASA into quite a frenzy as they tried to make it work once again. Thankfully for them, on February 5th, 2020, they were able to connect with Voyager 2 once again, and confirm that it was up and running and able to continue its scientific mission in regards to examining and studying interstellar space.
“Voyager 2 has returned to normal operations following the anomaly on Jan. 25, 2020,” NASA officials wrote in a statement. “The five operating science instruments, which were turned off by the spacecraft’s fault protection routine, are back on and returning normal science data.”
To give you some context as to how dramatic that is in terms of time and space. At present, it takes a signal from NASA to the Voyager 2 (or vice versa) about 17 hours. Which means that Voyager 2 is indeed one of the farthest man-made object in space right now. It’s almost as far in space as Voyager 1. And that also means that if NASA asked Voyager 2 something, and it replied, it would take about a day and a half for NASA to get its answer. That makes it 122 times greater in distance from the Earth than the sun is. Or 122 AUs.

#InsaneCuriosity#RecentSpaceDiscoveries #Voyager2

source

What Lies Beyond Our Solar System?

What Lies Beyond Our Solar System?

Science & Technology, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From the planets, to the stars, to the systems, to the great unknown of the universe, join us as we explore what lies beyond our solar system!
——————————————————————————————-
Subscribe for more videos:
Business Enquiries: lorenzovareseaziendale@gmail.com
——————————————————————————————-
8. The Scope Of Our Own Solar System
Before we look beyond it, let’s take stock of our own solar system and what it all is like. There are 8 definitive planets (and more than that if you count Dwarf Planets like Pluto), we have one star, The Sun, that we orbit around, and within the confines of our system are asteroid belts, various rocks of various sizes, tons of solar rays and radiation, and a whole lot more.
Just in our solar system there is a LOT of stuff to explore. Which is sometimes hard to find because the length of our solar system is about 287.46 billion kilometers long. And even in the year 2020 we’re STILL finding out things about our solar system that are shocking and surprising. But of course, the main goal of humanity as a whole is to do what many have thought is unthinkable. To go BEYOND our solar system and to not just see it, but explore it, and live upon it. To truly become a species that is intergalactic instead of just living in one very small part of the universe.
7. What Lies Immediately Beyond Our Solar System
So let’s posit for a moment that you are able to go and get out of the reach of our solar system. Behind the Kuiper Belt, beyond the Heliosphere, what are you going to find when you reach that edge beyond? What will you see? What will you experience?
The honest and very simple answer…is nothing. Because you’ll be in what is known as Intergalactic Space. Or, the space between galaxies and systems. But to be clear, just because you don’t see anything, doesn’t mean that nothing is there.
“If you took a cubic meter, there would be less than one atom in it,” Michael Shull, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science. “But when you add it all up, it’s somewhere between 50 and 80% of all the ordinary matter out there.”
Scientists are honestly deeply interested in this matter, or “Intergalactic Medium” because of how they feel it forms and even replenishes certain systems via the gas that it provides. The reason for this is that the medium is mostly hot, ionized hydrogen (hydrogen that has lost its electron) with bits of heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen and silicon thrown in. While these elements typically don’t glow bright enough to be seen directly, scientists know they’re there because of the signature they leave on light that passes by.
“IGM is the gas that feeds star formation in galaxies,” Shull said. “If we didn’t still have gas falling in, being pulled in by gravity, star formation would slowly grind to a halt as the gas [in the galaxy] gets used up.”
But because of its small numbers, when you’re floating through space, you’re almost literally floating through empty space. Which is why many note that all the planets and stars and celestial objects only fill up about 5% of the known universe. Everything else is minor matter, Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
6. Systems Beyond Our Own
Ok, so let’s say that you are able to reach another system. What would it be like? Well, that would depend on what you land upon.
Because there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy about 100,000 light-years across. The stars are arranged in a pinwheel pattern with four major arms, and we live in one of them, about two-thirds of the way outward from the center. Most of the stars in our galaxy are thought to host their own families of planets. Thousands of these extrasolar planets (or exoplanets) have been discovered so far, with thousands more candidates detected and awaiting confirmation. Many of these newly discovered planetary systems are quite different from our own.
In fact, part of the fun of astronomy in the eyes of many is going and seeing if you can indeed find a new planet, or star that hadn’t been noticed before, and seeing what details you notice about it. In fact, various agencies from NASA to the ESA and more have made their own satellites and probes and such that they’ve launched into space or our atmosphere to try and get better looks at planets and stars and see what we can find.
Some of the highlights for sure are many planets that are “Earth-Like” in structure or form or shape. Numerous kinds of stars from dwarf stars to binary stars, to Pulsars, Supernovas and more. They’ve found black holes at the center of most galaxies, and that’s still only scratching the surface of things.
4. Exoplanets
#InsaneCuriosity #TheSolarSystem #TheEdgeOfTheUniverse

source

Kuiper Belt: Facts And History!

Kuiper Belt: Facts And History!

Science & Technology, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From what the belt is, to how it’s helped change the classification of the solar system, and more! Join me as I reveal to you the facts and history of the Kuiper Belt!
——————————————————————————————-
Subscribe for more videos:
Business Enquiries: lorenzovareseaziendale@gmail.com
——————————————————————————————-
9. What Is The Kuiper Belt?
Despite it being a major part of our solar system, there are many who honestly don’t understand the grand scale and scope of the Kuiper Belt. So allow us to give you some perspective on the matter.
The Kuiper Belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive.
Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed “ices”), such as methane, ammonia and water.
The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System’s moons, such as Neptune’s Triton and Saturn’s Phoebe, may have originated in the region.
In many respects, the Kuiper Belt is the “end” of our solar system in terms of things like the physical objects that are there and reachable. The “edge” of the solar system is a slightly different matter as that would either be the Heliosphere (if you go by magnetic fields) or the Oort Cloud, which is where the suns’ gravity reaches the end of its influence.
But either way, the Kuiper Belt is a major part of our solar system in the literal and figurative sense. Which is rather interesting when you think about it because for a very long time we didn’t understand what was truly in that realm of space as a whole.
8. The Discovery Of The Kuiper Belt
To truly understand the Kuiper Belt, we have to dive into something you’re very familiar with, Pluto.
After the discovery of Pluto in 1930, many speculated that it might not be alone. The region now called the Kuiper belt was hypothesized in various forms for decades. It was only in 1992 that the first direct evidence for its existence was found. The number and variety of prior speculations on the nature of the Kuiper belt have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it.
But let’s go back to the beginning and just break it down from there, shall we?
The first astronomer to suggest the existence of a trans-Neptunian population was Frederick C. Leonard. Soon after Pluto’s discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, Leonard pondered whether it was “not likely that in Pluto there has come to light the first of a series of ultra-Neptunian bodies, the remaining members of which still await discovery but which are destined eventually to be detected”.
That same year, astronomer Armin O. Leuschner suggested that Pluto “may be one of many long-period planetary objects yet to be discovered.”
This is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that the discovery of Pluto should have been a finite discovery, or one that led to more study of the planet and what it could mean as a whole. Yet many scientists looked upon it and wondered if it was telling us everything we needed to know about the region.
In 1943, in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Kenneth Edgeworth hypothesized that, in the region beyond Neptune, the material within the primordial solar nebula was too widely spaced to condense into planets, and so rather condensed into a myriad of smaller bodies.
From this he concluded that “the outer region of the solar system, beyond the orbits of the planets, is occupied by a very large number of comparatively small bodies” and that, from time to time, one of their number “wanders from its own sphere and appears as an occasional visitor to the inner solar system”, becoming a comet.
That’s not a bad way to describe what the Kuiper Belt really is, and he was right that by modern classifications, the various items in the belt weren’t able to go and become fully-fledged planets. But more on that in a bit.
Before we continue to break down everything that’s going on with the Kuiper Belt, be sure to like or dislike the video, that way we can continue to improve our content for you, the viewer! Also be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss ANY of our weekly videos!
7. Continued Theories
The more that astronomers wondered about the Kuiper Belt, the more that speculations rose and fell about what it is, what it could be, what it could’ve been, and more.

#InsaneCuriosity #KuiperBelt #TheSolarSystem

source