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Looking Beyond Voyager 1 And 2
Live Science
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1/12/2025
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
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00:00
For the longest time, space seemed like a big, nearly empty place, and we were really
00:07
only familiar with our home, Earth.
00:11
But as we learned more, we realized there was actually a lot out there, including planets
00:16
orbiting the Sun and even other stars.
00:20
To get to these more distant worlds, though, it helps to start thinking of space as a bunch
00:24
of nested bubbles.
00:26
Our first bubble is the magnetosphere, Earth's invisible magnetic field that protects us
00:32
from high-energy particles and radiation from the Sun, allowing life as we know it to develop
00:37
and thrive.
00:39
The next bubble, just past the solar system, is the heliosphere, the edge of the Sun's
00:45
influence where the particles and fields of interstellar space take over.
00:51
The two Voyager spacecraft have left this bubble, and are our first interstellar spacecraft.
00:57
It took Voyager 1 35 years, and it took Voyager 2 41 years to travel this far.
01:04
The next stop is our nearest stars.
01:07
The Alpha Centauri system, at just over 4 light-years away, is close by cosmic standards,
01:12
but it would take either Voyager about 75,000 years to get there at current speeds.
01:18
We clearly need to use other tools to look for worlds that far away.
01:23
Enter Kepler, a space telescope that radically changed our understanding of planets outside
01:28
of our solar system, also known as exoplanets.
01:32
In finding thousands of new planets, Kepler showed that there are more planets in our
01:37
galaxy than there are stars.
01:40
But Kepler looked at only a small fraction of the sky, and many of the planets it discovered
01:45
are too far away to study in much further detail.
01:49
And that brings us to TESS, our newest planet hunter.
01:53
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite works like Kepler, and over the next two years
01:58
it will scan almost the entire sky.
02:01
By looking at closer and brighter stars, TESS will find and measure the sizes of dozens
02:07
of small, nearby planets, best suited for detailed investigation by powerful telescopes
02:13
on the ground and in space, like the future James Webb Space Telescope.
02:19
And by doing that, we might finally begin to answer the question of whether Earth is
02:24
alone, or whether there are worlds out there like our own, small and rocky, covered in
02:31
oceans and dense clouds, or even, possibly, capable of supporting life.
02:44
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