←back to thread

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

(www.iflscience.com)
246 points world2vec | 6 comments | 23 Jun 25 16:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
Show context
cooper_ganglia ◴[23 Jun 25 17:15 UTC] No.44357881[source]▶
I remember being in school in 2006 and being told that outside of our solar system is a "wall of fire" that we would never be able to cross.

I don't know if any of this info was speculated at that point in time, but it turns out that teacher was at least partially correct!

replies(5): >>44358002 #>>44358451 #>>44363043 #>>44363710 #>>44370441 #
jordanb ◴[23 Jun 25 17:26 UTC] No.44358002[source]▶
Probably true, in that if you try to travel interstellar distances you'll going to have to deal with very hot particles hitting your ship on occasion. If you travel slowly the more time you're going to be spend getting hit by high energy particles. If you try to travel quickly you're going to have to deal with more relatively high energy particles. It's potentially enough to make interstellar travel impossible.
replies(2): >>44358331 #>>44358765 #
1. strictnein ◴[23 Jun 25 18:45 UTC] No.44358765[source]▶
Systems we built in the 1970s were able to easily pass through this though. Which doesn't seem to indicate that it would make interstellar travel impossible.
replies(1): >>44358843 #
2. andrewflnr ◴[23 Jun 25 18:52 UTC] No.44358843[source]▶
Systems from the 1970s travel at, by interstellar standards, agonizingly slow speeds. The voyagers will be exposed to hard radiation for thousands of years before they get anywhere interesting. They will not survive.
replies(2): >>44359007 #>>44359571 #
3. strictnein ◴[23 Jun 25 19:10 UTC] No.44359007[source]▶
Not sure exactly why you're responding to me. The comment I was responding to was talking about the hot particles that would be encountered, and that their existence could preclude future interstellar missions.

What level of "hard radiation" are they now getting bombarded by that we will be unable to shield systems from in far future interstellar space travel?

replies(1): >>44360992 #
4. ◴[23 Jun 25 20:11 UTC] No.44359571[source]▶
5. andrewflnr ◴[23 Jun 25 22:48 UTC] No.44360992{3}[source]▶
I'm saying the Voyager probes don't make a counter example to interstellar travel being impossible. That's still very much an open question. We might be able to develop adequate shielding to protect spacecraft from radiation over mildly geologic timespans, but we might not. I'm certain it won't be as easy as you seem to think it is.

(Unless you count slinging a dead pile of former computers through a distant star system as successful interstellar travel, but that's not what most people are interested in.)

replies(1): >>44363357 #
6. mxkopy ◴[24 Jun 25 06:25 UTC] No.44363357{4}[source]▶
Imagine if a dead pile of computers that wasn’t ours arrived in our solar system, I’d call that successful by some metric