Voyager 1 experiencing "tsunami wave"

19 Dec 2014

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NASA scientists say messages sent by spacecraft Voyager 1, travelling at a distance of 19.5 billion kms from earth indicate that the spacecraft was experiencing a "tsunami wave" as it penetrated the interstellar medium beyond the solar, www.delhidailynews.com reported.

The spacecraft launched in the year 1977 was the farthest that a manmade object had reached from earth till date. From the spacecraft, signals from its instruments, travelling at the speed of light take some 36 hours and 14 minutes to reach earth.

The new information was presented by Don Gurnett, a professor of physics at the University of Iowa in Iowa City at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on 15 December.

A "tsunami wave" happens when the sun releases a coronal mass ejection, which expels a magnetic cloud of plasma from its surface, producing a pressure wave. When the wave runs through, the charged particles in the space between the stars called the plasma, a shock wave results that upsets the plasma.

"Most people would have thought the interstellar medium would have been smooth and quiet. But these shock waves seem to be more common than we thought," Gurnett said.

According to Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission based at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the tsunami caused the ionized gas out there to resonate - "sing" or vibrate like a bell, Times of India reported.

This was the third shock wave that Voyager 1 had experienced after the first in October to November of 2012, and the second in April to May of 2013 waves which revealed an even higher plasma density. Voyager 1 detected the most recent event in February, and was still on course as of November data. The spacecraft travelled 250 million miles (400 million kilometers) during the third event.

It was not clear to researchers what the unusual longevity of this particular wave might mean, and they were also uncertain as to how fast the wave was moving or how broad a region it covered.

With the second tsunami wave in 2013, researchers were able to say that Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere, the bubble created by the solar wind encompassing the sun and the planets in our solar system.

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