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Voyager 2 Is Back Online And Gathering Data Again!

Voyager 2 Is Back Online And Gathering Data Again!

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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!

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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

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The Power Of Neutron Stars!

The Power Of Neutron Stars!

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We know how terrifying and powerful black holes can be, but what comes second place in terms to it in terms of overall awesomeness? Join us today as we learn about neutron stars!

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One of the most popular outer space entities that pop culture love to revolve about is the black hole. We’ve seen various movies, TV programs, even some songs talk about how magnificent and mysterious they are. But what if black holes aren’t the only objects that we should be amazed with?

Of course we have a lot of picks for that matter, but the particular thing we would talk about today is the star that ranks number 1 in the universe in terms of density: the neutron stars.

Okay, astro fans, I can hear you argue and say “No, black holes are the densest objects in the universe!” But let me tell you this: remember how black holes work? They are effectively stars that collapsed to an almost zero volume, which results in their enormous gravitational force. If they effectively are dimensionless, can we really say that they are “objects”?

We can’t be really sure, and that’s something that only philosophy can answer, but while we’re here at the subject of definitions and what we actually know for certain, let’s just say the one we can categorize as the densest object, quote-unquote, is the neutron star.

And no, a neutron star is not a subatomic particle which grew to the size of the star. It isn’t also a bunch of neutrons agreeing to somehow collectively come together to form a humongous star. Although we can effectively say that a neutron star is like a giant atom, we’ll get to that later.

For now, I want to discuss how neutron stars are born and why they are like Phoenixes: how from the ashes of their old corpses, they rise up and fly with their new, replenished lives!

I know you already know this if you’re an astro buff, but to some of our viewers out there who are new, first of all, welcome! We hope we spark your curiosity more through our videos!

Anyway, stars were discovered to follow some kind of lifecycle, just like us living beings on Earth. They too, get born, have a childhood phase, then grow to adulthood, then also die, after certain circumstances.

A star’s usual routine involves fusing hydrogen into helium. Quite honestly, in its lifetime, that’s all it ever does. Now, as we know from basic nuclear physics, when we fuse atoms together, it creates energy. The energy that the fusion in the star creates is countered by the gravitational force towards its center, effectively keeping the balance and preventing it from collapsing towards its center. As long as this goes on, everything is good and well at a star’s life.

But of course, like all lives, stars experience a tipping point in theirs.

Remember how stars burn hydrogen to fuse to helium? Well, eventually, stars run out of hydrogen to fuse, so they fuse helium instead, forming elements such as carbon and oxygen. The energy pushes out the borders of the star causing it to move to its giant phase, until the pressure from electron degeneracy collapses the core of the star, and expelling its outer layer leaving a white dwarf.

For heavy mass stars, a number of times larger than the mass of our own Sun, the story is different.

The same as earlier, when the star runs out of hydrogen to fuse, it begins to fuse heavier elements. The difference this time is that the collapse caused by gravity is so extremely strong, way stronger than what we described earlier, that the fusion goes to Neon, to Oxygen, to Silicon, then finally to Iron.

As this happens, the outer layer of the star begins to fatten up faster as time goes by.

When the core of the star is finally iron, fusion can no longer take place, as iron is stubborn this way. We can imagine at this point, there is no more energy resulting from fusion. So what if that happens? The own weight of the star collapses in itself, effectively crushing it to the size of up to around a 10 kilometer radius. It’s like compressing the star to about the size of Malta!

Now, we know how subatomic particles don’t want to get near each other, right? We can practically say that an atom is made of empty space. However, the strength of the gravitational force that occurs when a heavy mass star collapses crushes this space in between, merging the protons and electrons together to form neutrons, with some neutrinos in excess.

But the extravaganza of energy doesn’t end there! See, neutrons hate being compressed towards one another, too. Just like protons and electrons. The collapse can only occur up to a certain moment where the neutrons form a lattice-like structure, the crushing in stops. By the way, this sudden halt is what we call neutron degeneracy pressure.

#InsaneCuriosity#NeutronStars #HowTheUniverseWorks

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