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

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00:01For the longest time, space seemed like a big, nearly empty place.

00:06And we were really only familiar with our home, Earth.

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

00:15including planets orbiting the Sun and even other stars.

00:19To get to these more distant worlds, though,

00:22it helps to start thinking of space as a bunch of nested bubbles.

00:26Our first bubble is a magnetosphere.

00:29Earth's invisible magnetic field that protects us from high-energy particles and radiation from the Sun,

00:36allowing life as we know it to develop and thrive.

00:39The next bubble, just past the Solar System, is the heliosphere,

00:44the edge of the Sun's influence, 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 four 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.

01:17We clearly need to use other tools to look for worlds that far away.

01:22Enter Kepler, a space telescope that radically changed our understanding of planets outside of our solar system,

01:29also known as exoplanets.

01:31In finding thousands of new planets, Kepler showed that there are more planets in our galaxy than there are stars.

01:40But Kepler looked at only a small fraction of the sky,

01:43and many of the planets it discovered are too far away to study in much further detail.

01:48And that brings us to TESS, our newest planet hunter.

01:52The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite works like Kepler.

01:56And over the next two years, it will scan almost the entire sky.

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

02:09best suited for detailed investigation by powerful telescopes on the ground and in space,

02:15like the future James Webb Space Telescope.

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

02:25or whether there are worlds out there like our own, small and rocky, covered in oceans and dense clouds,

02:33or even, possibly, capable of supporting life.

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