Watch the video above: Listen as Voyager 1 gets hit by three “tsunami waves.”
TORONTO – It’s the farthest any human-made object has ever travelled. And it’s been a bumpy ride.
NASA’S Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched on Sept. 5, 1977, has encountered three “tsunami waves” unleashed from the sun. The most recent wave, first detected in February 2014, is still ongoing, recent research has found.
“Most people would have thought the interstellar medium would have been smooth and quiet. But these shock waves seem to be more common than we thought,” said Don Gurnett, professor of physics at the University of Iowa. Gurnett presented the new data Monday, Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
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The other two waves occurred from October to November 2012 and from April to May 2013.
Tsunami waves originate from the sun after it releases a coronal mass ejection, spewing out a magnetic cloud of plasma. The wave of pressure meets the interstellar plasma, charged particles that exist between stars, creating the shock wave. The tsunami causes the ionized gas to vibrate or ring.
Researchers are keenly interested in the waves because they reveal more about interstellar space. The second tsunami wave, for example, helped researchers determine that Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere, a bubble that surrounds our solar system. Denser plasma vibrates or rings at a higher frequency. In 2013, Voyager travelled through plasma that was 40 times denser than what had been previously recorded.
But as the probe continues on, researchers will continue to study the data the probe collects.
READ MORE: New frontier: Voyager has become first spacecraft to leave the solar system
Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sept. 5, 1977, weeks after Voyager 2. The goal of the probes was to study the outer planets of the solar system.
During its 37-year mission the spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. But the spacecraft’s nuclear batteries — expected to last until 2020 — have allowed scientists to redefine the mission into the Interstellar Mission. This allows it to collect data from beyond our solar system.
As of December, the spacecraft was more than 19 billion km from Earth.
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