SUMMARY: Astronomers witnessed for the first time ever a rare collision of two dense neutron stars. The discovery began with an instrument called LIGO, which won this year's Nobel Prize for its discovery of gravitational waves once predicted by Albert Einstein. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien joins Hari Sreenivasan to explain how the collision was detected and what it reveals about the universe.
SUMMARY: February saw one of the most important astronomical breakthroughs of the decade, as a team of scientists “heard” gravitational waves -- a key postulate of Einstein’s theory of relativity -- for the first time in human history. Now, astrophysicist Janna Levin recounts that incredible discovery, and the human drama behind it, in her new book “Black Hole Blues.” Levin joins Jeffrey Brown for more.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The sound lasted about a fifth of a second, but it represented gravitational waves created by the collision of two black holes with the combined mass of about 62 of our suns a billion light years away.
“Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space” is a story of things extraordinarily small and hard-to-comprehend large, and of the human drama in discovering them.
Author Janna Levin is a physicist and astronomer at Barnard College. She’s also author of a novel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.”
So, the blues, we’re sort of in the realm of metaphor here, but the idea is to hear the universe, at least as aspects that we can’t possibly see.
JANNA LEVIN, Author, “Black Hole Blues”: Yes, most of what we know about the universe really does come to us from light.
And we have telescopes that span the range of light to take pictures of the sky. This is utterly different. This is not a form of light. So when the black holes collided, they were like mallets on the drum. They rang space-time itself.
JEFFREY BROWN: But you have got to be able to hear them.
JANNA LEVIN: Right. So, you have to be able to record the shape of the drum.
And that’s basically what this experiment did. It recorded the shape of the ringing drum from two black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so step back and explain to us as simply as you can, what is a gravitational wave? And why is it important to our understanding of things?
JANNA LEVIN: Yes. Yes.
So, a gravitational wave is really a ripple or a change in the shape of space and time itself. So, if you were floating near these colliding black holes, you would literally be squeezed and stretched. And you would experience this squeezing and stretching. It emanates from this collision. It causes these ripples in space, kind of like fish swirling in a pond causing water waves.
And then they emanate out. They travel at the speed of light, even though they are not light. And eventually they make it here to the Earth. If you were floating nearby, you might even literally hear the wave, because your ear could respond to the vibrations.
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JANNA LEVIN: Well, I think what people don’t appreciate is, that’s really how science is done.
People think that we just come down with these answers. As scientists, we are full of answers. That’s really not what it is like. Scientists are full of questions. Sometimes, the questions don’t lead you to the answer, but, sometimes, they do, and there is this great discovery.
But, yes, there is fighting along the way. There is competition. There are failures and successes. And at the end of the climb, some people made it to the summit, and some people didn’t.
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| Simulation of Gravitational Lensing GIF by Alain r |
SUMMARY: Gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime -- aren’t just an Einstein theory any more. A team of international scientists announced Thursday that they confirmed the waves’ existence after recording feedback from a black hole collision a billion light-years from Earth. Hari Sreenivasan learns more from Dave Reitze of the California Institute of Technology.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Now some truly cosmic news.
The sound of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, it was recorded by a team of scientists at the LIGO Observatory, proof of gravitational waves, or ripples in time and space, first theorized by Albert Einstein.
We explore this monumental moment in physics with Dave Reitze of Caltech, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory.
Now, that was a rudimentary attempt at explaining what a gravitational wave is. But what are they, and why is it such a big deal to find one?
DAVID REITZE, California Institute of Technology: Actually, you did a pretty good job.
So, gravitational waves are fluctuations in space-time. And any time you have a mass, something that has matter in it, accelerating, all right, it produces a gravitational wave. All right? And that’s a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
Now, these particular gravitational waves, in order to be able to detect them, you need really, truly massive objects. So, in this case, these were black holes that had about 30 times the mass of the sun in them.
So, why gravitational waves are so interesting is that they tell us something about the universe that you can’t get from any other kind of astronomy. So, if you think about optical astronomy, that looks at certain classes of light. If you look at radio astronomy — so gravitational waves are completely different.
They come from a different sector of the universe, and that’s why they’re so exciting.
HARI SREENIVASAN: OK. So Einstein is sitting at his patent clerk’s office thinking about this big thought, and what is the connection to space-time?
DAVE REITZE: Yes.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Does time and space bend? And if you heard or saw, so to speak, this moment, does that mean that time and space bent just a little bit at those points?
DAVE REITZE: Oh, in fact, this particular event was, as my colleague Kip Thorne calls it, a storm in space-time.
All right? As these two black holes came together and collided, they really disrupted space-time and produced this burst of gravitational radiation. It’s interesting that you mention Einstein. Gravitational waves were first predicted actually 100 years ago. And Einstein himself, all right, thought it was an interesting consequence of the theory of relativity, but didn’t think that it had any practical value, because he said that the effect is so tiny that we will never be able to measure them.
And it took 100 years from the time that he predicted them to the time we have been able to measure them.
SUMMARY: Most of us grew up thinking there were nine planets in the solar system, but that changed when Pluto got downgraded in 2006. Now there's news that there might be a ninth planet after all. Researchers have found evidence of a planet with a mass 10 times that of Earth. Jeffrey Brown talks to Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Nine planets in the solar system, right? That’s what most of us grew up thinking. Well, that ended in 2006, when Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet.
But now comes news that there might be a ninth planet after all. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (aka Caltech) found evidence of a planet with a mass 10 times that of Earth.
One of the Caltech astronomers, Mike Brown, joins us now. And I will add that he is also known as the chief culprit in lowering Pluto’s status. His memoir is titled “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.”
So, sort of making amends here I guess, Mike Brown?
MIKE BROWN, California Institute of Technology: You know, it’s — I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as, this is something I have been working at for 20 years, and Pluto was just collateral damage along the way.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so let’s be as clear as we can about what you have done here. You have not seen this new planet, right? This is something you surmise. Explain to us.
MIKE BROWN: Yes, that’s absolutely right, and it’s important to know that we — no one has actually seen this planet yet.
What we have done is felt it, or, more precisely, we have seen its gravitational effect on the most distant things in the solar system. And from those gravitational effects, we can tell that it must be out there. And this is the same way that Neptune, for example, was discovered, by its gravitational effects on Uranus. So, there’s a long history of this sort of astronomy.
JEFFREY BROWN: You’re seeing gravitational effects on several — I gather, six small bodies out there?
MIKE BROWN: There is actually quite a big collection.
There are six that are doing one thing. There are five more that are doing something else. And then there’s another eight doing something. When you put them all together, it’s a pretty big population that are going in directions and moving in ways that they shouldn’t be doing unless there is something organizing the whole pattern.
SUMMARY: Soon, some of the mystery surrounding Pluto, the distant dwarf planet, will be lifted. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, speeding through space for almost a decade on a mission to capture a myriad of data, is believed to have finally made a successful Pluto flyby. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Ready or not, it is finally time for Pluto’s closeup. Once a full-fledged planet, now considered something less, it remains an intriguing mystery 85 years after its discovery, but not for long. The picture is growing clearer as a fast-moving spacecraft arrives at the solar system’s underdog.
ALAN STERN, New Horizons Principal Investigator: It was always the planet with the little question marks everywhere. We didn’t know anything. And because it’s the last in the public mind, it takes a special place.
MILES O’BRIEN: Pluto has taken a special place in planetary scientist Alan Stern’s mind since 1988. That’s when he first began pushing NASA to send a spacecraft to what was then the ninth planet in our solar system.
The three-billion-mile journey of the New Horizons spacecraft began in 2006. It left the Earth faster than any spacecraft ever, making a beeline for Pluto, getting a gravitational kick from Jupiter as it bulleted past, snapping pictures all the while. And now, after nearly a decade in space, New Horizons is finally there.
HAL WEAVER, New Horizons Project Scientist: I like to call this a mission of delayed gratification, because it takes nine-and-a-half years to get all the way out to Pluto, but we’re almost there. And the opportunity to transform Pluto from a little pixelated blob into a world with complexity and diversity is just going to be amazing.
SUMMARY: Today, NASA released the first ever close-up photographs of Pluto. The images showed icy mountains and a mysterious pale patch shaped like a heart. Judy Woodruff speaks to science correspondent Miles O’Brien about what we have learned about Pluto so far.
SUMMARY: Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Judy Woodruff to discuss two space stories that center around the search for life and how it began. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, which scientists believe shows signs of life-sustaining water. Meanwhile, new research found that Mars once had enough water to cover 20 percent of the planet.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Let’s close out our Friday with the continuing search, not just for life, but for a better understanding of how life began.
There’s a connection in two space stories today. This morning, NASA said its Dawn spacecraft arrived in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, a journey of more than 300 million miles that lasted more than seven years. Ceres lies in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
And, yesterday, new research found that Mars once had even more water than we realized, enough to cover 20 percent of the planet and larger than our Arctic Ocean.
We’re joined by science correspondent Miles O’Brien.
So, Miles, tell us, what are they looking for on this tiny planet?
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Well, wherever you look in the world on our world and you see liquid water, you will find life. It doesn’t matter where. You can be in the hot acidic springs of Yellowstone or deep below the ocean in the darkest places. If there’s liquid water and an energy source, there is life.
And so this is what ties these two stories together. Dawn is arriving at Ceres. And there is lots of evidence that Ceres has quite a bit of water, perhaps an ice crust, perhaps even water geysers. A dwarf planet, Judy, has a molten core. And so there is reason to believe that there’s heat beneath the surface, which means there could be liquid water, which means there could be things alive there which date back 4.5 billion years.
It’s kind of mind-boggling, but this is like a snowball that’s been in the deep freeze, but it has a liquid core. And so understanding what’s going on there will tell us a lot about the origins of life here and maybe elsewhere.
Existing medical techniques are laying the foundations for an ambitious research project to send astronauts into a deep sleep on a six-month journey to Mars, according to the engineer leading the study.
"There's technology being used in the medical community that could support this - there's a wealth of data out there to support it," John Bradford, president of Atlanta-based SpaceWorks, told FoxNews.com. "It's a big step, but it could be adopted for space flight."
The NASA-funded study began 12 months ago, and conjures up images of science fiction - putting astronauts into a deep sleep, or torpor, during the long six-month journey to Mars.
“I don’t think that we could go to Mars without something like this technology,” Bradford said. Putting the crew into a deep sleep, he explained, would significantly reduce the amount of supplies and infrastructure needed to support the long space journey, from food to onboard living space.
The study predicts that putting a spacecraft’s crew into torpor, or stasis state, would cut the mission requirements from 400 tons to 220 tons of equipment and supplies.
Bradford told FoxNews.com that the torpor could be achieved by a technique called therapeutic hypothermia, which is already used in hospitals, albeit for a much shorter time period.
Therapeutic, or protective, hypothermia lowers a patient’s body temperature to reduce the risk of tissue injury following, say, a cardiac arrest when blood flow is limited.
In the thermal management system envisaged by SpaceWorks, a tube inserted into an astronaut’s nasal cavity will emit a cooled gas, lowering their temperature by about 10 degrees. Low-dose drugs will also be administered to suppress their shiver reflex and ease their passage into a deep sleep.
"Other than the duration, the procedural aspects of this are pretty benign," said Bradford.
Technologies are already commercially available in this area, such as the RhinoChill IntraNasal cooling system, which is used to induce therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest.
However, SpaceWorks acknowledges that there's a lot more research needed before someone is placed in a six-month sleep. Up to now, the longest torpor induced by therapeutic hypothermia is 14 days, according to Bradford.
The engineer told FoxNews.com that, while the research aims to wake astronauts just once, at the end of their journey, other sleep durations may be used. The crew, he explained, could sleep in shifts, with each astronaut in torpor for about two weeks and then conscious for two days, ensuring that one crew member is always awake during the mission.
While in stasis state, astronauts would be fed intravenously with an aqueous solution of carbohydrates, amino acids, dextrose, and lipids, according to Bradford. "They would not have any solid waste - it would be strictly urine," he said, noting that a catheter would be used to dispose of the liquid.
The medical industry is also developing technologies such as infection-resistant IV lines that could prove useful during the flight to Mars, Bradford said.
The crew could be brought out of their torpor by turning off the cooling gas and shivering suppressant. "Nominally, it would take about two hours to wake somebody," said the SpaceWorks president. "It would probably take a couple of days [for the astronauts] to get [fully] acclimated - our testing will include cognitive tests to examine their mental faculties when they wake up."
Bradford estimates that a typical Mars mission will involve a six month journey, followed by a year and a half on the red planet, and a six month journey back to earth.
While NASA has successfully completed unmanned missions to Mars, such as the Curiosity rover, putting humans on the planet is a much more challenging endeavor. NASA, for example, has a 2035 target for landing humans on Mars, although SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has predicted that people could be on Mars within 10 to 12 years.
SpaceWorks’ Bradford expects to see human Mars missions in 20 years, noting that the deep sleep research project is still in its infancy.
“There’s a ways to go,” he told FoxNews.com. “We have concluded the phase one effort, which is developing the initial design, the engineering details, and medical plausibility - we’re now looking at the next steps, which will be continued studies of the engineering challenges.”
Over the next five years, NASA and seven partner institutions will be taking on new projects to help paint a more complete picture about how life comes to be in the universe. The projects include preparing to bring back samples of the Martian terrain to Earth, investigating the role of comets and asteroids in delivering water and organic compounds around the solar system and researching how our own planet has managed to sustain life for so much of its history.
This week, NASA announced the winners of its seventh Cooperative Agreement Notice grant competition (CAN7), who will receive $50 million between them to conduct their research.
There are no plans to build a Starship Enterprise to hop from galaxy to galaxy in search of aliens among the projects, rather they will all take place here on Earth.
A team at the SETI Institute will be looking into the best ways to ensure that a planned 2020 NASA mission to bring back samples from Mars selects the ideal scoops of Maritan soil or rock and takes the best care of that precious cargo. Another project based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. will use natural hydrothermal chimney systems on our own planet as models to investigate how conditions on icy worlds such as Europa, Ganymede, and Enceladus might be able to support life.
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder will examine the potential of how rocks might power life on planets such as Mars when their chemical energy is released through interaction with water. Others will look at how Earth’s history might hold key secrets to the search for E.T., like a University of California at Riverside project to examine the history of oxygen in our own atmosphere and oceans.
“The intellectual scope of astrobiology is vast, from understanding how our planet went from lifeless to living, to understanding how life has adapted to Earth’s harshest environments, to exploring other worlds with the most advanced technologies to search for signs of life,” said Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s astrobiology program.
Each project team will receive about $8 million and join five continuing astrobiology project teams already participating in the program at the University of Washington in Seattle; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Scientists believe that almost 14 billion years ago, the universe was a hot, dense place that rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. The idea that the universe underwent a rapid expansion is called inflation; the universe spread out and cooled down, forming atoms that later made gas, dust, stars and planets.
But what exactly happened at the start of the universe has been unconfirmed until now. With a radio telescope at the South Pole, scientists followed gravitational waves 13.8 billion years into the past and found the first direct evidence of the universe’s rapid expansion immediately following the Big Bang. Scientists discussed their findings at a press conference Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“This is a totally new, independent piece of cosmological evidence that the inflationary picture fits together,” said theoretical physicist Alan Guth of MIT, who proposed the idea of inflation in 1980.
This is the first concrete evidence of gravitational waves, a phenomenon first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago. After major cosmic events like the merging of black holes or the Big Bang, gravity makes waves in spacetime that travel like ripples on a pond. These ripples travel at the speed of light, but Einstein thought they would be so feeble, they would be undetectable.
But scientists suspected that these ripples could still be found. Billions of years later, the waves are too weak to measure directly, so scientists have been looking for imprints left on the “cosmic microwave background”, a soup of elementary particles leftover from the Big Bang. A U.S.-led team, headed by scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, along with the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used a specialized radio telescope called BICEP2 (which stands for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) at the South Pole to hunt for the gravitational waves. The dry air, thin atmosphere and distance from cell phone and radio towers made the South Pole the ideal wave-hunting location.
The results will be submitted to a scientific journal this week for review and publication, said John Kovac of Harvard, who led the research project.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University said if the evidence of gravitational waves is confirmed, the discovery “gives us a window on the universe at the very beginning,” when it was less than one-trillionth of a second old, he told the Associated Press. He added that the results still need to be confirmed, but this study is the “best hope” of proving the universe’s early growth spurt.
“It’s just amazing,” he said. “You can see back to the beginning of time.”
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| Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon |
NASA is plotting a daring robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be some form of life.
The space agency set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said Tuesday that it would be launched in the mid-2020s.
Robinson said the high radiation environment around Jupiter and distance from Earth would be a challenge. When NASA sent Galileo to Jupiter in 1989, it took the spacecraft six years to get to the fifth planet from the sun.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute astronomer Laurie Leshin said it could be "a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system."
Past NASA probes have flown by Europa, especially Galileo, but none have concentrated on the moon, one of dozens orbiting Jupiter. Astronomers have long lobbied for a mission to Europa, but proposals would have cost billions of dollars.
Last year, scientists discovered liquid plumes of water shooting up through Europa's ice. Flying through those watery jets could make Europa cheaper to explore than just circling it or landing on the ice, said NASA Europa scientist Robert Pappalardo.
NASA will look at many competing ideas for a Europa mission, so the agency doesn't know how big or how much it will cost, Robinson said. She said a major mission goal would be searching for life in the strange liquid water under the ice-covered surface.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said going to Europa would be more exciting than exploring dry Mars: "There might be fish under the ice."
An amazing new photo of Saturn's north pole puts the planet's odd hexagon-shaped jet stream and dazzling rings on display.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft exploring Saturn and its moons snapped the photo — which NASA released Monday — as the probe flew 1.6 million miles above the ringed planet.
Cassini took its newest view of Saturn's polar vortex on Nov. 23, 2013, though the image itself was just released today. The hexagonal vortex is about 20,000 miles across and is a jet stream made up of 200 mph winds surrounding a huge storm, NASA officials have said. Scientists have not found another weather feature exactly like this anywhere in the solar system, space agency officials said. [See more amazing photos of Saturn's bizarre hexagon storm]
"The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement in 2013. "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries."
Saturn's hexagonal jet stream might be so long lasting because the planet is basically a giant ball of gas. Landmasses disrupt currents on Earth, but the storm remains stable on Saturn due to a lack of solid landforms, according to NASA.
Cassini has been able to image the strange feature since 2009 when Saturn's northern hemisphere became illuminated by the sun during the planet's northern spring, NASA officials said. Scientists used 128 of Cassini's images to create an incredible video of the hexagon-shaped jet stream last year.
Cassini isn't the first spacecraft to see Saturn's strange jet stream. NASA's Voyager mission first spotted the hexagon in the 1980s.
The $3.2 billion Cassini mission launched toward Saturn in 1997. It arrived at the ringed wonder in 2004 and has been sending back incredible photos of the planet and its moons since then. The probe is currently on an extended mission, and is expected to collect data until at least 2017, at which point it will burn up in Saturn's atmosphere.
"As we approach Saturn's summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary," Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement in 2013.
SUMMARY: At the bottom of a nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, scientists at one of the world's most sophisticated particle physics observatories are investigating one of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos: What is dark matter? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien helps to shed some light on the research at SNOLAB.
SUMMARY: The Cassini spacecraft has been capturing snapshots from Saturn for the past 10 years. Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute talks to Judy Woodruff about capturing and sharing images of the "jewel of the solar system" and discoveries made about the planet's meteorology and moons.
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky—a Swiss astronomer working at CalTech—had an amazing revelation. He realized that the amount of matter that we can see through our telescopes doesn't match the behavior of the Universe. There had to be something else that we couldn't see. Something that accounts for an astonishing 83 percent of all existing matter but is invisible to us.
Or it was. Now, for the first time in history, a team of astronomers has observed these hidden tendrils that extend everywhere. Dark matter, the mysterious substance that appears to give the Universe its structure, has finally been revealed.
The results of the study were published in Nature last Wednesday, going mostly unnoticed because of the announcement of the Higgs boson.
The research, lead by Jörg Dietrich, an astronomer at the University of Munich Observatory in Germany, observed the large-scale structure filaments intersections in which galaxy clusters occur:
[This marks] the first time we have observationally verified this very important theoretical prediction.
These dark tendrils have been impossible to observe until now because they are not dense enough. But Dietrich and his colleagues have been able to locate a filament that could be observed, a gigantic dark matter tendril that is 18 megaparsecs long. It connects Abell 222 and Abell 223, two galaxy clusters located 2.7 billion light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Cetus.
The team was able to observe the dark matter not only because of the vast size of the filament, but because of its orientation: it is perpendicular to Earth, along our line of view. That made it more dense from our perspective, increasing the gravitational lensing that deforms the light of objects behind it. By observing this optical distortion over 40,000 background galaxies, they know that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 10^13 and 9.8 × 10^13 times the mass of the Sun.
They used data from the XMM-Newton spacecraft, processed with a new computer analysis technique that revealed the precise shape of the filament, thus showing the dark matter and confirming the theoretical model proposed by Zwicky at the beginning of the 20th century.
Until know, there has never been direct observation of this substance. You could have seen the effect in the 3D map of the universe below, which shows how galaxies are clumped along an apparently branched structure. However, this was just an indication of the existence of something invisible with enough gravitational power to make those shapes.Both astronomers and physicists are very excited about this discovery. Astrophysicist Mark Bautz, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks that "what's exciting is that in this unusual system we can map both dark matter and visible matter together and try to figure out how they connect and evolve along the filament." Alexandre Refregier, a cosmologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, thinks that this observation will complement the work to find dark matter on Earth at laboratories like the Large Hadron Collider or Fermilab.
Slowly, every day, we are uncovering the secrets of the Universe one by one. And we'll continue to, until the Universe gets tired of us and sends us an giant asteroid to get rid of those pesky humans.
The Voyager 1 space probe has reached the edge of the solar system, extending its record for being the most distant man-made object in space.
According to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the spacecraft is sending back data to Earth showing a sharp increase in charged particles that originate from beyond the solar system.
"Voyager scientists looking at this rapid rise draw closer to an inevitable but historic conclusion - that humanity's first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system," NASA said in the statement.
Voyager 1, along with its sister spacecraft Voyager 2, was launched in 1997 and is now about 18 billion kilometers from the Sun. It is moving at a speed of about 17 km per second and it currently takes 16 hours and 38 minutes for data to reach NASA's network on Earth. Voyager 2 is about 15 billion kilometers from the Sun.
Between them, the probes have explored all the giant planets of the solar system; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, as well as 48 of their moons.
They both carry a greeting for any extraterrestrial life they may bump into, a phonograph record and 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with sounds and images of life and culture on Earth selected by a group chaired by the famous space scientist Carl Sagan.
The charged particles hitting Voyager 1 originate from stars that have exploded elsewhere in the galaxy. They have been steadily rising as it approaches interstellar space but that trend has become sharper in recent months.
"From January 2009 to January 2012, there had been a gradual increase of about 25 percent in the amount of galactic cosmic rays Voyager was encountering," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
"More recently, we have seen very rapid escalation in that part of the energy spectrum. Beginning on May 7, the cosmic ray hits have increased five percent in a week and nine percent in a month."
The exact position of the edge of the solar system is unclear but another indicator that Voyager has entered interstellar space is expected to be a change in the direction of the magnetic fields around the space craft. NASA scientists are looking at data from the craft to see if this predicted change has occurred.
"The laws of physics say that someday Voyager will become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, but we still do not know exactly when that someday will be," said Stone. "The latest data indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly. It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's frontier."
The plutonium power sources on the Voyager probes are designed to last until 2025. When they die, the probes will keep hurtling through space towards other stars in the Milky Way but they will no longer transmit data back to Earth.
New observations from a NASA space telescope have spotted what may be the very first objects created in the universe in unprecedented detail, scientists say.
The faint objects, imaged in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer space telescope, might be hugely massive stars or black holes, but are too distant to see individually.
The Big Bang is thought to have kick-started the universe about 13.7 billion years ago. At first, the universe was too hot and dense for particles to be stable, but then the first quarks formed, which then grouped together to make protons and neutrons, and eventually the first atoms were created. After about 500 million years, the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take shape.
The scientists can't confirm for sure that the objects they see date from the early universe, but say that's the most likely explanation.
"These objects would have been tremendously bright," Alexander "Sasha" Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement Thursday (June 7). "We can't yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe, but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a glimpse of an ancient epoch."
Spitzer spotted these ancient structures after observing two patches of sky for more than 400 hours each. The telescope sees in infrared light, the long-wavelength range of the electromagnetic spectrum that's less energetic than optical light.
The researchers first removed all known stars and galaxies from the images. What was left over showed lumps of structure in a pattern consistent with how very distant objects are thought to cluster together.
The light spied by Spitzer has probably traveled for billions of years to reach us. It would have started out as optical or ultraviolet light, but over time stretched until it became infrared.
While Spitzer, which launched in 2003 and orbits the sun in an unusual Earth-trailing path, has made inroads in observing these objects, scientists are waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope to make major progress in understanding them.
James Webb, billed as the successor to the Hubble telescope, is an $8.8 billion infrared observatory due to launch in 2018.
"This is one of the reasons we are building the James Webb Space Telescope," said Glenn Wahlgren, Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "Spitzer is giving us tantalizing clues, but James Webb will tell us what really lies at the era where stars first ignited."
The researchers report their findings in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
Saturday night, if the full moon, rising in the East, strikes you as unusually large, you'll be right. It will loom larger than usual. Though it's hardly a scientific term, it will be what's known as a "supermoon."
If the weather is clear where you are, it should be a sight to see. It happens because -- despite what our senses usually tell us -- the moon does not orbit us in a perfect circle. It follows a slightly elliptical path every month. On Saturday night at 11:35 p.m. EDT, say astronomers, it will come within 221,802 miles of us -- coincidentally about one minute before it's at its fullest. Two weeks later, on the opposite side of its orbit, it will be about 252,000 miles away.
The result: When the moon is closest to Earth, it appears 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than when it's farthest from us.
Remember the numbers. They'll come in handy at the end of this story.
"The full Moon has a reputation for trouble," wrote Tony Phillips, an astronomer who maintains NASA's Science News site. "It raises high tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes.
"If a moonbeam wakes you up on the night of May 5th," he added, "you might want to get out of bed and take a look."
But is there really anything "super" about it, beyond the spectacle? Astronomers say emphatically not. It may increase high tides in places by a few inches, but that's about it.
For all the folklore about full moons and mental illness ("lunacy"), social scientists have searched in vain for correlations between the moon and crime rates or admissions to psychiatric institutions.
So if the weather cooperates (check our weather page for a forecast), look outside -- fearlessly -- and drink in the moonlight. Many people say the best time to look is early evening, just as the moon is coming up over the horizon. You'll see the moon, pumpkin-colored, slowly rising in the East -- and, boy, will it look large.
It is, in fact, no larger in the sky than when it's overhead, but our minds fool us, perhaps because we have a reference point -- something on the horizon -- that we lack when it is high among the stars.
"For instance," said Phillips in an email, "when you see the moon in close proximity to a tree, your brain will miscalculate the distance to the moon, mentally bringing it closer (like the tree) and thus making it bigger. It seems so real, but this beautiful illusion is all in our minds."
We said it would be useful to remember the moon's changing distance from Earth, and here's why:
Two weeks from now, on the afternoon of May 20, the moon will be in its new phase, passing between Earth and the sun.
The result will be a solar eclipse -- one that will be visible in a strip of the Western United States, stretching southeastward from the Oregon-California border to Lubbock, Texas.
It should be a spectacular sight, visible from Reno, Albuquerque, Zion National Park and parts of the Grand Canyon -- but it won't be the kind of eclipse you most often see pictured.
Recall that on Saturday the moon, at perigee, will appear 14 percent larger? On May 20, it will seem 14 percent smaller -- in other words, not quite enough to block the sun.
The result will be what's known as an annular eclipse. A blindingly-bright ring of sun ("ring" in Latin is "annulus") will surround the black disc of the moon.
Still worth a trip if you're inclined, but a bit less "super" than other such sights. It's the price we'll pay for a big, bright "supermoon" this weekend.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): More than 20 years ago, space scientist William Borucki dreamed up a plan to explore our galaxy to find the extent of life, if there is any, beyond the Earth. It was a daunting and expensive challenge.
This week, and $600 million later, at a conference of his peers in Mountain View, Calif., Borucki and NASA announced they had found the first planet in the habitable zone. That means what's being called the Goldilocks planet is just right, orbiting its star at the proper distance to have water, necessary for life.
Similar to Earth, though bigger, scientists say the temperature averages about 72 degrees -- 600 light years away, it orbits its own sun every 290 days. Borucki and his team found it using the Kepler space telescope, which was launched three years ago and remains in orbit around the sun.
He calls it a giant camcorder which was designed specifically to look for planets where life might be possible, and at the stars they orbit, 150,000 of them, much like our own sun.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ....they're big, they're scary, and, lucky for us, they're about 300 million light years away.
We're talking about the largest black holes in the universe, and nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Astronomers recently discovered two black holes, each one 10 billion times the size of our sun. Their findings are being reported this week in the journal "Nature."
Joining me now is Chung-Pei Ma. She is a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and led the team that published the study.
