Voyager surfs Solar System's edge

An artist's impression of Voyager 1 as it passes across the Milky Way

"It could be any day, but it could also be several more years."

Ed Stone cannot say when the Voyager-1 spacecraft will leave the Solar System, but he believes the moment is close.

The latest data from this extraordinary probe, reported in this week's Science journal, suggests it is surfing right on the very edge of our Sun's domain.

The particles streaming away from our star have reduced to a trickle at its present location, 18.5 billion km from Earth.

Particles flying towards it from interstellar space, by contrast, have jumped markedly in the past year.

It all points to an imminent departure, which would make Voyager the first man-made object to cross into the space between the stars.

"It's hard to imagine there's another layer between the one we're in and the outside," Dr Stone told BBC News. "Topologically, it makes sense that this is the outermost layer. The only question is: how thick is it?"

Launched way back in 1977, the probe has now travelled so far from home that its constant chatter of data takes 17 hours to arrive at the US space agency's receiving network. And chatter, it does.

Voyager's instruments are busy sampling the far-flung environment. This has allowed Dr Stone and colleagues to map the shape and reach of the heliosphere - the giant bubble of charged particles blown off from our Sun.

Voyager 1 Discovers Bizarre and Baffling Region at Edge of Solar System

Image: A model of the solar system’s edge using recent data. Voyager 1′s latest findings will likely rewrite this image, as soon as scientists figure out exactly what they mean. NASA/JPL/JHUAPL

Not content with simply being the man-made object to travel farthest from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft recently entered a bizarre new region at the solar system’s edge that has physicists baffled. Their theories don’t predict anything like it.

Launched 35 years ago, Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 made an unprecedented tour of the outer planets, returning spectacular data from their journey. The first Voyager sped out of the solar system in 1980 and it has since been edging closer and closer to interstellar space. The probe is currently outmore than 120 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Scientists initially thought that Voyager’s transition into this new realm, where effects from the rest of the galaxy become more pronounced, would be gradual and unexciting. But it’s proven to be far more complicated than anything researchers had imagined, with the spacecraft now encountering a strange region that scientists are struggling to make sense of.

“The models that have been thought to predict what should happen are all incorrect,” said physicistStamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who is lead author of one of three new papers on Voyager appearing in Science on June 27. “We essentially have absolutely no reliable roadmap of what to expect at this point.”

The sun produces a plasma of charged particles called the solar wind, which get blown supersonically from its atmosphere at more than 1 million km/h. Some of these ions are thrown outward by as much as 10 percent the speed of light. These particles also carry the solar magnetic field.

Eventually, this wind is thought to hit the interstellar medium – a completely different flow of particles expelled from the deadly explosions of massive stars. The extremely energetic ions created in these bursts are known as galactic cosmic rays and they are mostly blocked from coming into the solar system by the solar wind. The galaxy also has its own magnetic field, which is thought to be at a significant angle to the sun’s field.

Researchers know that Voyager 1 entered the edge of the solar wind in 2003, when the spacecraft’s instruments indicated that particles around it were moving subsonically, having slowed down after traveling far from the sun. Then, about a year ago, everything got really quiet around the probe. Voyager 1’s instruments indicated at the solar wind suddenly dropped by a factor of 1,000, to the point where it was virtually undetectable. This transition happened extremely fast, taking roughly a few days.

Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures

Extreme Life

From bacteria that can survive inside rocks to microbes that can withstand tremendous heat, cold and radiation, life can take some extreme forms. These enterprising creatures reveal not just the resilience of life on Earth, but the possibilities for life elsewhere in the universe. Here are some especially amazing examples of so-called extremophiles.

Not a drop to drink

Some organisms, such as Dunaliella algae discovered in 2010 in a cave in Chile's Atacama desert, can thrive on very little water. Despite living in the driest place on Earth, these mooching microbes grow on top of spiderwebs to capitalize on dew – the meager amounts of air moisture that condense on the webs in the mornings.

Hot stuff

So-called hyperthermophiles are species that thrive in extremely hot environments. The Aquifex genus of bacteria, for example, has been found living in hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, where temperatures can reach 205 degrees Fahrenheit (96 degrees Celsius).






Frugal living

One extreme species, the Thermococcus microbe, can survive on so little energy that until now the chemical reaction it uses wasn't thought able to sustain life. These organisms were found living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents where super-hot water seeps out of the Earth's crust near Papua New Guinea. In addition to their thrifty use of energy, the microbes can survive in extreme temperatures too scorching for most creatures.

Researchers Create Remote-Controlled Cockroaches

A group of scientists at the North Carolina State University has created a legion of inexorable cyborg cockroaches. The method of Kinect was used by researchers to direct cockroaches to the good side.

As per the findings, Kinect is an extremely simple method, in which roaches were wired tested with a small circuit. The same helped in sending electrical impulses to the cerci and antenna of the roaches. Cerci are the sensory organs, which the creatures have on their abdomen.

The cockroaches were this way made to step forward. Remote control also helped in changing their direction. The entire thing was then lashed into a Kinect setup.

The report found Kinect was later used to track the progress of cockroaches all along a predetermined path. Signals were sent with an aim to guide the creatures and data was gathered on the roaches' response to the impulses. Since, the same could help fine-tune the system for more accuracy.

The team is of the hope that the remote-controlled cockroaches could be used in future for hunting survivors in unsafe situations such as collapsed buildings.

"We want to build on this program, incorporating mapping and radio frequency techniques that will allow us to use a small group of cockroaches to explore and map disaster sites", affirmed Bozkurt.

Nasa sets Grand Challenge to public: find earth-destroying asteroids

White House and space agency launch search to help prevent mankind going the way of the dinosaur

Image: Search not destroy … the public is being asked to help find asteroids that could collide with Earth. 

The White House and Nasa will ask the public for help finding asteroids that potentially could slam into the Earth with catastrophic consequences.

Citing planetary defence, the government has decided that the search for killer rocks in space should be the latest in a series of "Grand Challenges", in which the US government sets an ambitious goal, helps create public-private partnerships and sometimes offers prize money for innovative ideas.

"This is really a call to action to find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them," Nasa Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said last week. She said the asteroid hunt would help prove that "we're smarter than the dinosaurs".

There is a second, overlapping agenda at work: the Nasa human spaceflight programme needs to find a target rock for what is now being called the Asteroid Redirect Mission (formerly the Asteroid Retrieval Mission), or ARM.

The proposed mission, which is early in the planning stages, would send astronauts to visit an asteroid that had been redirected into a high lunar orbit. But first a robotic spacecraft would have to rendezvous with the asteroid and capture it. And even before that, scientists would have to find the right asteroid.

The target rock has to be moving at a leisurely pace relative to the Earth, and ideally would come close to the Earth-moon system sometime in the early 2020s. Nasa has a shortlist of possible targets, but all need further scrutiny to see if they have the size, shape, spin rate and composition that the asteroid mission would require.

Two recent feasibility studies used as their reference a rock discovered in 2009, but Nasa scientists aren't sure that it will meet the mission requirements. For one thing, it might turn out to be too small. They plan to study it this fall with the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Bumpy-Faced Cow-Sized Reptile Roamed the Ancient Desert

An artist's rendering of the Bunostegos and its bump-ridden face.

The face of the Bunostegos looks like it was made by a kindergartner who went wild with a tub of Play-Doh. Flaps of skin are stretched below its chin, hanging like stalactites. Hard knobs decorate its nose and forehead. As weird-looking as the animal is, it was able to live in the harsh deserts of the ancient supercontinent, Pangea.

Archaeologists at the University of Washington discovered three Bunostegos skulls in the rocks of the Moradi Formation in Niger. The details behind these fossilized remains will be published in next month's issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The skulls are believed to date back to the late Permian period, more than 250 million years ago, and older than many dinosaur fossils seen today in museums.

Bunostegos, Latin for "knobby skull roof," belongs to a completely different animal group than dinosaurs, said Linda Tsuji, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington who was the lead author of the journal article on Bunostegos.

New Plasma Device Considered The Holy Grail Of Energy Generation And Storage

Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.

Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.

While most of us are familiar with three states of matter — liquid, gas and solid — there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.

Star is crowded by super-Earths

Scientists have identified three new planets around a star they already suspected of hosting a trio of worlds.

Image: An impression of what the sky might look like from the exoplanet Gliese 667Cd, looking towards the parent star and featuring, at top, two other nearby stars. One of the newly discovered planets, Gliese 667Ce, can be seen as a crescent. 

It means this relatively nearby star, Gliese 667C, now has three so-called super-Earths orbiting in its "habitable zone".

This is the region where temperatures ought to allow for the possibility of liquid water, although no-one can say for sure what conditions are really like on these planets.

Gliese 667C is 22 light-years away.

Astronomers can see it on the sky in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion).

Previous studies of Gliese 667C had established there were very likely three planets around it, with its habitable zone occupied by one super-Earth - an object slightly bigger than our home world, but probably still with a rocky surface.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escude of the University of Göttingen, Germany, and Mikko Tuomi, of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has re-examined the system and raised the star's complement of planets.

The researchers used a suite of telescopes including the 3.6m telescope at the Silla Observatory in Chile. This incorporates the high-precision Harps instrument. Harps employs an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky.

Full to bursting

Image: The Harps instrument has had great success at identifying super-Earths

The planets' presence needs to be disentangled from this complex signal but the Harps instrument is recognised as having tremendous success in identifying smaller worlds.

Gliese 667C is a low-luminosity "M-dwarf" star just over one-third the mass of our Sun.

This means its habitable zone can be much closer in before temperatures make liquid water impossible. The team is now confident that three rocky worlds occupy this region at Gilese 667C.

Cassini captures gigantic hurricane on Saturn in exquisite detail

Features of Saturn's Great White Spot as small as 14 km were imaged

Jupiter's Great Red Spot may get most of the attention, but it's hardly the only big weather event in the Solar System. Saturn, for example, has an odd hexagonal pattern in the clouds at its north pole, and when the planet tilted enough to illuminate it, the light revealed a giant hurricane embedded in the center of the hexagon. Scientists think the immense storm may have been there for years.

But Saturn is also home to transient storms that show up sporadically. The most notable of these are the Great White Spots, which can persist for months and alter the weather on a planetary scale. Great White Spots are rare, with only six having been observed since 1876. When one formed in 2010, we were lucky enough to have the Cassini orbiter in place to watch it from close up. Even though the head of the storm was roughly 7,000 km across, Cassini's cameras were able to image it at resolutions where each pixel was only 14 km across, allowing an unprecedented view into the storm's dynamics.

The storm turned out to be very violent, with convective features as big as 3,000 km across that could form and dissipate in as little as 10 hours. Winds of over 400 km/hour were detected, and the pressure gradient between the storm and the unaffected areas nearby was twice that of the one observed in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. By carefully mapping the direction of the winds, the authors were able to conclude that the head of the White Spot was an anti-cyclone, with winds orbiting around a central feature.

Researchers Develop Sugar Solution That Turns Tissues Transparent

A group of Japanese researchers have developed a new sugar solution that turns tissues transparent in three days without altering its chemical composition or shape.

The world of science and medicine is constantly evolving as scientists and researchers develop new and innovative techniques and medications. In one such spectacular new development, a team of Japanese researchers from RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology has created a new sugar solution that makes tissues transparent in a matter of three days without altering either its chemical composition or its shape.

Researchers of the new development also confirmed that when this solution was used with fluorescence microscopy, it provided detailed images of the brain at resolutions that have never been obtained before.

Researchers from Japan and USA have in the past tried developing solutions and techniques that could make biological samples transparent to enable researchers to get a better understanding of what lies deep down inside biological structures like the brain.