Latest news with #Voyager1
India Today
2 days ago
- Science
- India Today
Nearest star is 4.5 light years away, Voyager-1 hasn't even made it 1 light-day from Earth in 50 years
Nearest star is 4.5 light years away, Voyager-1 hasn't even made it 1 light-day from Earth in 50 years 28 Jul, 2025 Credit: Nasa The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 4.25 light-years away. This distance means light, traveling at about 300,000 km/s, takes 4.25 years to reach us from that star. Proxima Centauri is a small red dwarf star in the Alpha Centauri system, much smaller and cooler than the Sun. Voyager 1, launched in 1977 and traveling for nearly 50 years, has not yet traveled the distance light covers in one day. While Voyager 1 has journeyed about 167 astronomical units (AU), or roughly 25 billion kilometers, it is still under one light-day from Earth, where a light-day is about 26 billion kilometers[core knowledge]. As of mid-2025, it takes light around 23 hours and 10 minutes to travel between Voyager 1 and Earth, just shy of a full light-day. Voyager 1 is expected to pass the full light-day distance mark only around November 2026, nearly 49 years after its launch[core knowledge]. Light travels roughly 300,000 kilometers per second—making it vastly faster than any human-made spacecraft. This enormous speed difference highlights the vastness of space, where distances are measured in light-years because traveling between stars with current technology is extraordinarily slow[core knowledge]. At Voyager 1's current speed, it would take over 70,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. This stark figure illustrates how immense the gulf between stars really is and shows why interstellar travel remains a major scientific and engineering challenge[core knowledge]. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star roughly 12% of the Sun's mass and about 14% of its diameter. Although faint and invisible to the naked eye, it exhibits flare activity that occasionally dramatically increases its brightness. It is part of a triple star system with Alpha Centauri A and B. From Proxima Centauri's viewpoint, the Sun would appear as a moderately bright star in the constellation Cassiopeia. Its relative proper motion and position in the night sky reflect its dynamic movement through our galaxy, making it the Sun's nearest stellar neighbor for the foreseeable future.
Boston Globe
21-07-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Hundreds of NASA employees, past and present, sign letter of formal dissent
In an email statement, Bethany Stevens, the NASA press secretary, said NASA would never compromise on safety. 'Any reductions — including our current voluntary reduction — will be designed to protect safety-critical roles,' she said. Advertisement 'To ensure NASA delivers for the American people, we are continually evaluating mission lifecycles, not on sustaining outdated or lower-priority missions,' Stevens said. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Upheaval within NASA continued Monday, when Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., announced she was 'stepping aside' on Aug. 1. In an email sent to center employees at 12:45 p.m. and shared with The New York Times, she did not give a reason for her departure. Cynthia Simmons, the center's deputy director, will take over as acting director. 'I am honored to have been part of this incredible journey with you,' Lystrup wrote. The NASA letter follows similar letters of criticism by federal employees at the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, said he welcomed respectful dissent, but the EPA placed 144 employees who signed that agency's letter on leave. Advertisement 'We're scared of retaliation,' said Monica Gorman, an operations research analyst at Goddard. She said that staff members 'go to the bathroom to talk to each other, and look under the stalls to make sure that no one else is there before we talk.' Gorman is one of 287 current and former NASA employees who signed the letter, although more than half did so anonymously. More than 15,000 people work at the space agency. Prominent scientists outside of NASA, including 20 Nobel Prize winners, also offered their names in support. The NIH letter inspired some people at NASA to put together a similar effort. The NIH letter writers had called their dissent the 'Bethesda Declaration' — the agency is in Bethesda, Md. — and the NASA letter writers called theirs the 'Voyager Declaration,' in honor of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the two NASA space probes launched in the 1970s that continue to function as they fly through interstellar space. 'One of the messages that NASA management has been passing down to every employee is that no one is coming to save us, including Congress,' said one of the organizers of the letter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for retaliation. 'So the Voyager Declaration is one effort to raise our voices and speak out to save ourselves,' the person added. The letter is framed as a 'formal dissent' — an official process at NASA for registering disagreements that managers may not want to hear. It was part of changes instituted at NASA after the losses of the Columbia and Challenger space shuttles when concerns of some engineers were brushed aside. Advertisement Stand Up for Science, a nonprofit organization that has organized opposition to the Trump administration's cutbacks of science research, has helped coordinate the letters to the three agencies. In its budget request to Congress in June, the Trump administration proposed slashing NASA's budget by almost 25 percent. NASA's science mission directorate, which includes earth science, solar system missions and astrophysics, would face a cut of 47 percent, to $3.9 billion from $7.3 billion. Nineteen currently operating science missions, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the two Orbiting Carbon Observatories, would be turned off and discarded. In her statement, Stevens said, 'The reality is that President Trump has proposed billions of dollars for NASA science, demonstrating an ongoing commitment to communicating our scientific achievements.' Congress does not appear to agree with making draconian cuts. A Senate subcommittee proposed providing $7.3 billion for NASA's science mission directorate for fiscal year 2026, the same amount as the current year. Its counterpart in the House of Representatives was less generous, proposing $6 billion for the science missions. While NASA has so far avoided widespread layoffs, thousands of employees have left or are planning to leave under early retirement and buyout offers. 'Some I know have left because they want to make space for other younger people to stay,' Gorman said. One complaint of the letter writers is that NASA leaders have made decisions based on the president's proposed cuts, without waiting to see what Congress will provide. Another concern is that even if Congress provides money for science missions, the administration could refuse to spend it. Advertisement Last week, in a letter to Duffy, two Democratic members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology -- Reps. Zoe Lofgren of California and Valerie Foushee of North Carolina -- accused NASA of illegally implementing Trump's priorities. 'Congress directs NASA to spend money on certain missions, programs and priorities; and Congress sets the policies that NASA must implement,' Lofgren and Foushee wrote. 'These congressional actions are not friendly requests. They are the law.' This article originally appeared in
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
Elio is Pixar's best, most beautifully brilliant movie in a decade. Too bad it will probably bomb
As a film, Elio is gorgeous. In short, it's a somehow equal parts miraculous and original wonder — so good it feels a bit out of place among a summer of adaptations, remakes, sequels and remakes of adaptations of sequels. Perhaps not that last one. But it is hard to ignore the benefits of Elio : Pixar's animation style (which seemed stuck in a perpetual state of diminishing Toy Story returns) has never looked more fluidly beautiful — especially when used to create a tapestry of glittering nebulae and spaceships. Its characters come to life with originality and heart — none more so than its heart-breakingly damaged namesake, 11-year-old Elio Solis, a space-obsessed child trying his very best to provoke an alien abduction rather than running from one. Brushing past some of its almost too kidd-ish qualities, Elio achieves almost shocking levels of originality, beauty and terrifying tragedy that do more than earn it the title of modern classic. That said, it's probably going to bomb. There are more than a few reasons why that's the case for Pixar's latest release, and buckle up, because it all comes quickly. We're introduced to the movie's heroic, pint-sized namesake with the narrative equivalent of a sledgehammer to the skull. Elio is a silent, terrified child hiding under a restaurant table, worrying the laces of oversized shoes as he tries to spontaneously phase out of existence rather than acknowledge his aunt's futile attempts to coax him back to his chair. It's a lost cause though. We soon learn that Elio (Yonas Kibreab) has just been orphaned, and his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is the unfortunate, too-young-for-this stopgap, burdened with unwanted parenthood she doesn't have the life skills to handle — especially while juggling her job as a major in the U.S. Air Force, overseeing an array of telescopes scanning the skies for space debris. But Elio's no slouch. As he wanders off into the base, he's more than aware he's the one thing a child fears most — the primal, instinctive fear that eventually evolves into the scattershot assortment of neuroses we call a personality: being unwanted. And as he stumbles into a conveniently-placed exhibit on Voyager 1 — the 1977 probe (new window) launched with a golden record, information about life on Earth and hopeful greetings for alien species — we suddenly get the animated equivalent of Citizen Kane 's Rosebud. Lying on his back, gazing slack-jawed at a glittering star-show about humanity's search for friendly intelligence in the lonely and infinite cosmos while a single tear pools on his cheek, he understands: if no one wants him on this planet, he'll go looking for one that does want him. Elio's brilliant animation feels like a step forward for Pixar, despite maintaining the CGI style the studio has been known for since 1995's Toy Story. (Disney/Pixar) Photo: (Disney/Pixar) But it also does more. This latest offering from Pixar has finally arrived in theatres after a year-long delay and a wildly shifting strategy, possibly resulting from its fraught behind-the-scenes trajectory. The result is a disparate, possibly alienating tonal melange of a UFO movie — somehow even more disorganized than that congressional hearing on UFOs (new window) we are all somehow fine with having happened. For example: Jokes, storylines and even its sometimes stilted, always hand-holdy plot beats ring of a grade-school reading level — perhaps even more childish than Pixar's increasingly tween-focused fare. But that's at cross-purposes with Canadian co-director Domee Shi's sci-fi/horror allusions (new window) that, though geared toward a younger audience, still manage to make grown-ups shiver. How one scene depicting a disintegrating clone — almost directly lifted from Rick & Morty 's horrifying "melting clone babies" (new window) moment — will manage not to inspire a juvenile nightmare epidemic is a mystery for the ages. Delays, rewrites To be fair, these moments are infrequent; a scriptwriting vestigial limb of what was likely a whiplash-inducing envelope push for Pixar. Given that the once dominant-studio's last big non-sequel success was 2017's Coco , it makes sense that they'd be swinging for the fences while trying to recapture the cultural zeitgeist with Elio , at least with the initial version. Speaking to The Wrap (new window) , Pixar chief Pete Docter claimed Elio 's delay from last year was due largely to the SAG-AFTRA strike, but behind-the-scenes changes saw the departure of much of the creative team (new window) , ushering in replacements Shee and co-director Madeline Sharafian. That shift means the story is sometimes at odds with itself, and elsewhere obviously fractured and awkwardly reassembled. The final version of the film has been so fundamentally altered that virtually every moment from its original trailer was purged — including one of the riskiest, genre-pushing, jokes: I'm trying to get abducted, Elio says (new window) , before quickly clarifying: "By aliens!" But even after the loss of some of the more risque asides, there's a seriously mature plot under the surface, one that reflects Disney's wonderfully inventive, surprisingly unsuccessful (new window) 2007 time-travel comedy Meet the Robinsons. In that movie, there's a scene in which one character gives a singular reason for his relentless villainy. In a flashback, we see a rage-filled, pint-sized orphan with bags under his eyes, skulking through a middle school hallway. Other children smile and wave as he passes and enthusiastically ask if he'd like to hang out after class while complimenting his cool, flowery-pink unicorn binder. They all hated me, he narrates. In Elio , our hero's Meet the Robinsons -esque trauma-borne impulse to wall himself off from love or intimacy adds the last ingredient to this frankly bizarre hodgepodge: devastating tragedy. While it's maybe a little subtextual for the toddlers, anyone who's heard the phrase male loneliness epidemic will see the beginnings of mental health issues that too often morph into isolation, depression and rage. Few children's movies have grappled with this before — let alone while vesting it in such a crushingly sad character arc. The hardest thing about watching Elio becomes keeping yourself from jumping through the screen to protect him at all costs. And there's also another complicating plot conceit: a 1985 interview with astronomer Carl Sagan (new window) , initially about space exploration and his book Contact . The search for life elsewhere is remarkable in our age, because this is the first time that we can actually do something besides speculation, we hear Sagan's sage voice intone. It touches to the deepest of human concerns: Are we alone? This is quickly reinterpreted through Elio 's more Earth-bound theme, as the voiceover tellingly bookends his flailings toward and away from love and acceptance, both from the aliens and Olga. In short, it's a lot. The movie's originality is something to be marvelled at. Unfortunately, like Meet the Robinsons , it's probably too original and too divisive to find a massive audience. A polarizing study in loneliness that, unlike the intentionally tame and wildly successful Lilo & Stitch remake (new window) , is anything but conventional, Elio is a joyous, tragic, miracle of creativity. What's most sad is how unlikely it is to be rewarded for that. Jackson Weaver (new window) · CBC News
Economic Times
18-06-2025
- Science
- Economic Times
Voyager hits a 'Wall of Fire': NASA probe finds a furnace at the edge of the solar system
Voyager 1 has detected a shell of superheated plasma far beyond Pluto—offering a direct look at where the Sun's influence ends and interstellar space begins. From nearly 24 billion kilometres away, NASA's ageing Voyager 1 has sent back a signal confirming one of the most extreme discoveries yet: a narrow region near the heliopause where plasma has been heated to an astonishing 30,000 to 50,000 Kelvin. This marks the latest in a string of insights from the 48-year-old spacecraft. The heliopause, which defines the outer edge of the Sun's protective bubble known as the heliosphere, is where solar wind slams into material from interstellar space. It's not a wall in the traditional sense—but data show a sharp, localised zone of extreme discovery began with a spike in temperature data—despite the fact that Voyager 1's original plasma detector had failed years two other instruments still running—one monitoring cosmic ray hits, the other measuring the local magnetic field—spotted the clues. Solar wind ions dropped sharply. Meanwhile, cosmic ray counts surged and the magnetic field began to bend. That's when scientists realised what they were seeing. Researchers processed the data and saw evidence of a hot plasma shell, possibly just 1 astronomical unit thick. Hours later, Voyager 2—following its own path—picked up the same pattern, confirming the phenomenon wasn't a fluke.'It's a narrow, searing frontier,' said NASA Heliophysics scientists. And the spacecraft sailed right through no flame out there. No oxygen to feed one. But the searing temperature comes from the collision of the supersonic solar wind crashes into the slower-moving interstellar medium, magnetic turbulence and compression force particles into a higher energy state. That's where the heat comes from—particles zipping around at extreme speeds in a vacuum barely dense enough to warm short: it's a cosmic blast furnace, but with so little matter that Voyager's hull doesn't heat up.'She's been driving for five decades and just found the hottest rest stop in the universe,' quipped Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's flight director, after the data appeared on her Pasadena of the biggest surprises wasn't the heat—but the alignment of magnetic expected the magnetic field outside the heliopause to change direction entirely. But both Voyager probes have found that the magnetic field beyond the boundary runs almost parallel to the one within the heliosphere. NASA explained: 'An observation by Voyager 2's magnetic field instrument confirms a surprising result from Voyager 1: The magnetic field in the region just beyond the heliopause is parallel to the magnetic field inside the heliosphere.' That's upended existing models of the Sun's protective bubble. It suggests the heliosphere may be more closely connected to the galaxy's magnetic environment than previously assumed—and that our cosmic shielding from high-energy radiation might work in ways still not fully has important implications for protecting Earth and for long-duration human engineers remain in awe that Voyager 1 still data trickles in at just 160 bits per second. It takes 22 hours for a single message to arrive back at Earth's Deep Space Network.'That silence after you send a command is the longest coffee break imaginable,' said Todd Barber, Voyager systems ageing plutonium battery can now only support a few instruments. But NASA has juggled power usage carefully to keep the most valuable sensors running. Even at 48 years old, the probe continues to report back from the is already planning the next step. In 2026, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) will launch to observe the heliopause from within. It aims to capture the same plasma flows that Voyager just measured, but with modern instruments and clearer further ahead is a proposed Interstellar Probe mission, designed to reach 400 AU in 50 years. Its goal? Map this fiery region—this 'invisible wall of fire'—in unprecedented of this future planning leans on Voyager's current 1 crossed into interstellar space on 25 August 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, followed in 2018. But even now, these machines keep pushing the boundaries of what humanity knows about the edge of its own solar findings aren't just scientific curiosities. They help shape real-world plans to shield astronauts from cosmic radiation and inform how Earth's magnetic defences another dozen years, the last of Voyager 1's instruments may fall silent. But its final contribution—a message from the solar system's burning edge—might be its most now, it's still out there. Floating. Listening. Sending home the secrets of the stars.
National Geographic
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
The Golden Records tell the story of Earth. Will alien worlds ever find them?
In 1977, NASA launched two 12-inch gold-plated copper disks filled with the sounds of children's laughter, heartbeats, and bird calls. Is their time in space running out? The Golden Record carried by Voyager 1 and 2. Photographs of Jupiter by Voyager 1 on March 24, 1979 and Uranus by Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986. Photo Illustration by Jesse Barber, National Geographic; Image Sources from Nat Geo Image Collection, NASA/JPL In 1977, NASA launched Voyagers 1 and 2 from Cape Canaveral, Florida into space to embark on a grand tour of the far reaches of our solar system. Mounted on board each probe was a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk—a cosmic 'message in a bottle' engraved with sights, sounds, and depictions of life on Earth, collectively known as the Golden Records—on the slim chance some far-off alien civilization might discover them. And in Disney and Pixar's animated film Elio, in theaters June 20, that's exactly what happens when main character Elio encounters aliens who believe he is Earth's leader. 'It's meant to be a sort of a letter of introduction to any culture who might find the probe,' says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology and a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer, of the real-life Golden Records. Though these gilded greetings were partly intended for an alien audience, they mostly served as a message to humans and our tiny blue marble planet. 'It's a love letter to Earth and all that we have come through to get to the point where we could send these probes to understand our solar system.' But where are the Golden Records now—and how much longer are they intended to last in space? We spoke to the experts, including Ehlmann, to find out. When tasked with figuring out what to include in the intergalactic mixtape aboard the Voyager probes, renowned astronomer Carl Sagan assembled a team of scientists, artists, and engineers. For a true depiction of life on Earth aboard humankind's most distant physical emissary, the team included a variety of sounds associated with daily life and nature, like bird calls, humpback whale songs, children's laughter, footsteps, heartbeats, brain wave scans, and a kiss. There are also 90 minutes of music contained on the disk, including Western classical compositions from Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, Senegalese percussion music, Australian Aboriginal songs, and Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode.' (The close of cosmos, and golden voices in the stars.) The carefully thought-out record, designed to endure space travel for billions of years, also consists of spoken greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, as well as 115 analog-encoded photographs of Earth and its inhabitants. Engraved on the cover of these records is a map to help find one's way to Earth relative to nearby known, flashing, dense cores of stars called pulsars. There are etched diagrams of a hydrogen atom—the most common element in the universe—and instructions for playing each record. Each disk is enclosed in a protective, gold-plated aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle to play it. "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space," Sagan, leader of the Voyager Golden Record project, wrote. "But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet." (Dear Voyagers: How your billion-year journey carries true love.) A far-out cosmic road trip Over the years, the Voyager probes flew by the solar system's most distant four planets at a rate of 35,000 miles per hour, sending back detailed views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their moons. Voyager 2 flying by Uranus and Neptune is the only time humanity has seen these worlds up close. After completing their primary missions to collectively fly by all four outer planets in 1989, the twin probes kept chugging along through the vast outer reaches of the solar system. Voyager 1 and 2 exited the solar system and entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively. At more than 15 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 has become the most distant human-made object in space. Voyager 2, in second place, is now about 13 billion miles away. The interstellar environment they're in contains a stew of cosmic gas, dust, and rays. The twin Voyager probes are equipped with radiation-resistant parts, but the onslaught of charged particles in their current neck of the woods still pose a threat to their aging electronics. Both Voyager spacecrafts are still collecting and sending back data, updating humans on their intergalactic adventures, albeit slowly—it takes nearly 20 hours for these signals to reach Earth, given the immense distance they need to travel. We're now reaching the end of the Voyager missions, as the twin probes' plutonium power supplies are running out of juice. The Voyager team is attempting to extend their lifetime for as long as they can by shutting down non-essential instruments like heaters to conserve power. 'More than 47 years into the mission, there's very little power left,' says Suzanne "Suzy" Dodd, the current project manager for the Voyager missions. 'The goal of the mission is to get it to 50 years.' Even after the probe's science mission ends, though, the Golden Records will keep quietly drifting further and further into the cosmic abyss, likely for millions and even billions of years.'Long after we've lost communications with the spacecraft, it'll still be traveling with this record—a time capsule,' Dodd says. She remarks that it's exciting 'to think about a little piece of us, a little piece of what Earth and humanity is all about, traveling around the center of our galaxy to be found by whatever being might be out there.' But, as Dodd points out, there are enormous physical and chronological distances involved. It's going to take around 40,000 years for the probes to drift into the vicinity of any other star system, when Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445. Around the same time, Voyager 2 will be within 1.7 light-years of the star Ross 248. The legacy of the Golden Records The Golden Records have left a huge cosmic impact. According to Ehlmann, most spacecrafts that followed the Voyager mission included some sort of message from our Earthly abode. 'People sometimes think of science as a cold and calculating endeavor, but really it's the expression of curiosity and awe,' she says. 'It's an ability to leave your mark in the universe.' And almost fifty years after they first took flight, our pair of plucky robot emissaries to the stars continues embarking on the deepest journey ever into space. 'Who knows? The Voyager probes, a million years from now, may end up in some alien museum,' Ehlmann says. 'It's exciting to imagine.' Disney and Pixar's "Elio" is in theaters June 20, 2025. Get tickets now.
