The Daily Blog

NASA Voyager Craft Discover Magnetic ‘Bubbles’ At Solar System’s Edge.

NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft have made a baffling discovery along their journey to the outer limits of the solar system.

Scientists studying the Voyager data noticed what may be giant magnetic bubbles located in the heliosphere, the region of our solar system that separates us from the violent solar winds of interstellar space.

The bubbles, scientists believe, form when the sun’s magnetic field becomes warped at the edge of our solar system.

“The sun’s magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system,” astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University said in a statement released Thursday. “Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina’s skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are, the folds of the skirt bunch up.”

What will these bubbles tell us about the way our sun’s magnetic field interacts with interstellar rays entering our solar system? According to CNET, Voyager project scientist Ed Stone told CBS News that this layer of bubbles “might affect how cosmic rays from outside can actually get inside the heliosphere. They have to sort of manage to get across all these bubbles.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched the Voyager craft 33 years ago on a mission bound for interstellar space.

Kepler Spacecraft Finds 2 Planets Sharing Same Orbit.

To date, the telescope on the Kepler spacecraft has detected 1,235 planet candidates, and while Earth-bound telescopes are trying to determine if 54 of those planets may have conditions that could harbor life, one unique planetary system may have been uncovered.

Unique because it’s the first time scientists have discovered what may be two planets sharing the same orbit of their home sun, New Scientist reports.Since planets are so far away and smaller than their host stars, Kepler is only able to “see” the potential planets by measuring any decreases in the brightness of stars, which would be caused by planets passing in front of them.

If this dual-orbiting planet hypothesis gets confirmed, researchers suggest it would lend credence to a theory that our moon was created when a planet-sized object, sharing a similar orbit to Earth’s eons ago, possibly crashed into our home world.”Systems like this are not common, as this is the only one we have seen,” said Jack Lissauer, a space scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

The double-planetary system, dubbed KOI-730, is described in greater detail by Lissauer and his colleagues in the Astrophysical Journal.”About one-third of the 1,200 transiting planet candidates detected in the first four months of Kepler data are members of multiple candidate systems,” the scientists wrote.

“Several considerations strongly suggest that the vast majority of these multi-candidate systems are true planetary systems.”

A big question scientists now wonder about the KOI-730 planets is whether they’re headed for a runaway collision that could result in the formation of a moon.

But, in the galactic scheme of things, these two potential planets will most likely continue their cosmic close dance with each other for at least another 2 million years.