Looking Beyond Voyager 1 And 2

Live Science

NASA has explored the space beyond Earth and our solar system with spacecraft like Voyagers 1 and 2, and how we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets with space telescopes like Kepler and TESS. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Transcript

00:00For the longest time, space seemed like a big, nearly empty place, and we were really

00:07only familiar with our home, Earth.

00:11But as we learned more, we realized there was actually a lot out there, including planets

00:16orbiting the Sun and even other stars.

00:20To get to these more distant worlds, though, it helps to start thinking of space as a bunch

00:24of nested bubbles.

00:26Our first bubble is the magnetosphere, Earth's invisible magnetic field that protects us

00:32from high-energy particles and radiation from the Sun, allowing life as we know it to develop

00:37and thrive.

00:39The next bubble, just past the solar system, is the heliosphere, the edge of the Sun's

00:45influence where the particles and fields of interstellar space take over.

00:51The two Voyager spacecraft have left this bubble, and are our first interstellar spacecraft.

00:57It took Voyager 1 35 years, and it took Voyager 2 41 years to travel this far.

01:04The next stop is our nearest stars.

01:07The Alpha Centauri system, at just over 4 light-years away, is close by cosmic standards,

01:12but it would take either Voyager about 75,000 years to get there at current speeds.

01:18We clearly need to use other tools to look for worlds that far away.

01:23Enter Kepler, a space telescope that radically changed our understanding of planets outside

01:28of our solar system, also known as exoplanets.

01:32In finding thousands of new planets, Kepler showed that there are more planets in our

01:37galaxy than there are stars.

01:40But Kepler looked at only a small fraction of the sky, and many of the planets it discovered

01:45are too far away to study in much further detail.

01:49And that brings us to TESS, our newest planet hunter.

01:53The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite works like Kepler, and over the next two years

01:58it will scan almost the entire sky.

02:01By looking at closer and brighter stars, TESS will find and measure the sizes of dozens

02:07of small, nearby planets, best suited for detailed investigation by powerful telescopes

02:13on the ground and in space, like the future James Webb Space Telescope.

02:19And by doing that, we might finally begin to answer the question of whether Earth is

02:24alone, or whether there are worlds out there like our own, small and rocky, covered in

02:31oceans and dense clouds, or even, possibly, capable of supporting life.

02:44Beeping

02:47Beeping

02:50Beeping

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