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NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System

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246 points world2vec | 4 comments | 23 Jun 25 16:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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ElijahLynn ◴[23 Jun 25 17:28 UTC] No.44358034[source]▶
"While not a hard edge, or a "wall" as it has sometimes been called, here both spacecraft measured temperatures of 30,000-50,000 kelvin (54,000-90,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which is why it is sometimes also referred to as a "wall of fire". The craft survived the wall as, though the particles they measured were extremely energetic, the chances of collision in this particle-sparse region of space are so low that not enough heat could be transferred to the duo."
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1. dogma1138 ◴[23 Jun 25 17:29 UTC] No.44358048[source]▶
Is there a chance this is an instrument error? Seems a strange phenomenon.
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2. echelon ◴[23 Jun 25 17:36 UTC] No.44358122[source]▶
I'm just a layperson, but I'd suspect the research is sound.

I hate the telephone tag, livescience.com-type journalism. Instead, I'd love to read an abstract and methods. The research must talk about this in detail and explain how the conclusions are reached. It probably isn't too inaccessible.

I suspect that there may be many such measurements correlated between both probes taken against some other baseline signal or an observed return to the mean.

3. gmueckl ◴[23 Jun 25 17:43 UTC] No.44358224[source]▶
This isn't strange at all, but rather an artifact of the nature of heat energy in a medium. Heat is the uncorrelated movement of particles that evens out to zero effective velocity. Temperature is the measure of the velocity magnitude of these individual particles. This is independent of the medium's density.
4. koolala ◴[23 Jun 25 18:43 UTC] No.44358743[source]▶
That's the best part of them sending two of them. It can't be a random error.