Voyager left solar system last year, new research shows

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Aug 15, 2013 8:28pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's long-lived Voyager probe crossed into interstellar space last year, becoming the first man-made object to leave the solar system, new research shows.

Scientists have been waiting for Voyager to detect a magnetic field that flows in a different direction than the solar system's magnetic field. But the new research shows that scenario is not accurate.

"We think that the magnetic field within the solar system and in the interstellar are aligned enough that you can actually pass through without seeing a huge change in direction," University of Maryland physicist Marc Swisdak said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.

That would mean that Voyager actually reached interstellar space last summer when it detected a sudden drop in the number of particles coming from the sun and a corresponding rise in the number of galactic cosmic rays coming from interstellar space.

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Voyager lead scientist Edward Stone, now retired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Swisdak's research is interesting but different computer models are portraying different scenarios to explain the Voyager data.

"We know where Voyager is in terms of distance and we know what it is observing. The challenge is relating that to these complex models of the interaction between the interstellar medium and the heliosphere," Stone said, referring to the bubble of space that falls under the sun's influence.

Stone and other scientists believe Voyager is in a previously unknown region, dubbed a "magnetic highway," that exists between the heliosphere and interstellar space.

Voyager 1 and a sister probe, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 to study the outer planets. Voyager 1 is now about 120 times farther away from the sun than Earth. Voyager 2 is heading out of the solar system in a different direction.

The probes are powered by the slow decay of radioactive plutonium. Voyager 1 will begin running out of energy for its science instruments in 2020. By 2025, it will be completely out of power.

If Swisdak and colleagues are correct, Voyager 1's magnetic field readings will stay pretty much the same throughout the remainder of its mission.

"If they see a strong shift in the magnetic field, a big jump, then that means that what we've outlined can't be correct," Swisdak said.

"I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong here and if I were, that would be kind of cool. But it agrees with all the data that we have so far," he added.

More evidence may come when Voyager 2 crosses the solar system's boundary as well.

The research appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Bill Trott)

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TV Footage Shows Some Of The First Polio Shots Given In The U.S.

A recently digitized TV news archive highlights the big points of the 1950s and 1960s: Civil Rights and the polio vaccine.
School Polio Shot, 1955 A boy grimaces as he receives one of the first polio shots ever dispensed in Roanoke, Virginia. WSLS-TV footage archived by the University of Virginia Library

In 1955, days after officials introduced the "new, wonder vaccine" against polio to Roanoke, Virginia, local news station WSLS-TV asked some parents in the street about it. Of the four adults they interviewed, three said they planned to get their children vaccinated. "I do think it's a worthwhile project and I hope it's going to be a success," one woman said.

Another woman, however, seemed a bit more skeptical—a sentiment that some modern parents might recognize. "I think I shall wait until I see some of the results from the other children," she said.

That old footage is now available online, thanks to a new project by the University of Virginia Library. In 2010, the National Endowment for the Humanities gave the library a little more than a quarter of a million dollars to preserve and make digital copies of WSLS-TV broadcasts dating from 1951 to 1971, along with printed anchors' scripts. The library released the archive this week.

You can keyword search the archive, but the library has highlighted some of the coolest stuff. There are reports on the desegregation of local schools and the Civil Rights movement. And there's a page dedicated to the introduction of the polio vaccine to Roanoke, which served as a distribution center for the shot for most southwestern Virginia counties. The development of a successful polio vaccine was big news throughout the U.S.

Anchor Script for a 1955 Polio Vaccine News Spot:  WSLS-TV, archived by the University of Virginia Library

Interestingly, the archive shows that at the beginning, scientists didn't know everything about the vaccine they were giving out. A decade after the first Roanokans received shots, a 1965 WSLS-TV broadcast carried the city health commissioner's call for locals to begin or finish their immunization program. Re-immunization was important, he said, "because the length of time a person is protected by either [the Salk or Sabin forms of the vaccine], is still a matter of conjecture." The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend three or four shots for lifetime protection against polio.

[University of Virginia Library]

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The decline of reality singing shows

NEW YORK — As The Voice ends its third season, tell us if this scenario sounds familiar.

A give-it-your-all reality competition becomes a national fascination. Other shows mimic its formula — and eventually another show becomes the nation’s reality spectacle of choice. It outpaces its predecessor and makes many of us forget just how original the original once seemed.

We aren’t just talking about American Idol, but also Mark Burnett’s Survivor, the show that may be most responsible for launching the reality genre in the US. Just as The Voice has surpassed Idol, Idol once overcame Survivor.

Survivor debuted in 2000, two years later came Idol, which went on to rule US television for eight years, dwarfing its predecessor and everything else in the ratings.

Idol owed its success partly to the brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, who was every bit as shrewd as Survivor’s first-season winner, Richard Hatch.

Viewers also tuned in for the watch-through-your fingers performances of aspiring stars like civil-engineering student William Hung.

In the 2011-12 TV season, Idol got competition from The Voice, which unlike Idol didn’t succeed by playing rough. The singing competition, which closed its third season in the US on Tuesday night, took a more encouraging approach (subbing in “coaches” for “judges”).

In the process, it replaced Idol on the list of Emmy contenders for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program last year, leaving the original singing show out of the category where it had been a staple for nine consecutive years. The Voice has finally bumped Idol as the top singing show — though neither sing-off now scores the outsized ratings Idol once did.

To hear Burnett tell it, The Voice owes its success to being “a kinder show.”

No matter how much of a role they truly play, the judges behind the table — or coaches in the spinning chairs — always get the credit or blame for a show’s success or slide. It’s true that Idol began to lose its bulletproof status when Cowell departed for X Factor. And though his new show earns respectable ratings, they lag those of Idol and The Voice. On the other hand, Cowell may have miscalculated when he decided to turn his X Factor, which debuted in 2011, into a higher-stakes, tougher Idol.

So, do musical competition shows need to get nicer? Or nastier? The much-hyped Idol rivalry this year between Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey didn’t produce as much ratings heat as Fox may have hoped for. And the lower X Factor ratings despite the much-hyped addition of Britney Spears in Season Two suggests that big names can’t guarantee better numbers.

Is it possible that the shows really are, as the judges and producers always insist, really about the contestants? If so, no one’s going to to blame those contestants for singing shows’ slide. More likely, some viewers think they’ve seen it all. Reuters

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Book explains allergies, asthma; magazine rates teen TV shows for safe-sex info

Healthy Kids

Help for 'sneezers and wheezers' "Allergies and Asthma" (American Academy of Pediatrics, $14.95)

The second edition of "Allergies and Asthma" is an important resource for parents because of the authority of the publisher: the American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization of 60,000 pediatricians. The paperback guide, which is dedicated to "the sneezers and wheezers â?¦ the scratchers and rashers," covers the basics of what allergies and asthma are, how to test for them and how to live with them. This edition includes new medications and the most up-to-date recommendations on topics such as environmental factors that can cause asthma symptoms. But it doesn't go into new research about how or when to introduce potentially allergenic foods to infants or whether avoiding certain foods during pregnancy can reduce the incidence of allergies in your child.

Safe sex on tv

Some teen shows neglect protection POZ, January/February issue

Teens having sex on TV shows isn't new, but in 2011 you might hope that the shows would at least encourage safe sex. POZ, the lifestyle magazine for people with HIV/AIDS, evaluated a variety of teen TV shows for how often characters took actions or talked about the need to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies. "Glee" got the lowest rating because Artie and cheerleader Brittany had no such discussion before hopping into the sack. "Gossip Girl" and "90210" were in the middle of the pack. The ABC Family series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" earned the top rating for the safe-sex PSAs that follow each episode.

- Rachel Saslow

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New Study Shows Very First Stars Not Monstrous

Scientists are simulating how the very first stars in our universe were born. This diagram shows a still from one such simulation. The cube on the right is a blown up region at the center of the box on the left. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kyoto Univ.
› Full image and caption November 10, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. -- The very first stars in our universe were not the behemoths scientists had once thought, according to new simulations performed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Astronomers "grew" stars in their computers, mimicking the conditions of our primordial universe. The simulations took weeks. When the scientists' concoctions were finally done, they were shocked by the results -- the full-grown stars were much smaller than expected.

Until now, it was widely believed that the first stars were the biggest of all, with masses hundreds of times that of our sun. The new research shows they are only tens of times the mass of sun; for example, the simulations produced one star that was as little as 43 solar masses.

"The first stars were definitely massive, but not to the extreme we thought before," said Takashi Hosokawa, an astronomer at JPL and lead author of the new study, appearing online Friday, Nov. 11 in the journal Science. "Our simulations reveal that the growth of these stars is stunted earlier than expected, resulting in smaller final sizes."

The early universe consisted of nothing more than thin clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. A few hundred million years after its birth, the first stars began to ignite. How these first stars formed is still a mystery.

Astronomers know that all stars form out of collapsing clouds of gas. Gravity from a growing "seed" at the center of the cloud attracts more and more matter. For so-called normal stars like our sun, this process is aided by heavier elements such as carbon, which help to keep the gas falling onto the budding star cool enough to collapse. If the cloud gets too hot, the gas expands and escapes.

But, in the early universe, stars hadn't yet produced heavy elements. The very first stars had to form out of nothing but hydrogen and helium. Scientists had theorized that such stars would require even more mass to form, to compensate for the lack of heavy elements and their cooling power. At first, it was thought the stars might be as big as one thousand times the mass of our sun. Later, the models were refined and the first stars were estimated to be hundreds of solar masses.

"These stars keep getting smaller and smaller over time," said Takashi. "Now we think they are even less massive, only tens of solar masses."

The team's simulations reveal that matter in the vicinity of the forming stars heats up to higher temperatures than previously believed, as high as 50,000 Kelvin (90,000 degrees Fahrenheit), or 8.5 times the surface temperature of the sun. Gas this hot expands and escapes the gravity of the developing star, instead of falling back down onto it. This means the stars stop growing earlier than predicted, reaching smaller final sizes.

"This is definitely going to surprise some folks," said Harold Yorke, an astronomer at JPL and co-author of the study. "It was standard knowledge until now that the first stars had to be extremely massive."

The results also answer an enigma regarding the first stellar explosions, called supernovae. When massive stars blow up at the end of their lives, they spew ashes made of heavier elements into space. If the very first stars were the monsters once thought, they should have left a specific pattern of these elements imprinted on the material of the following generation of stars. But, as much as astronomers searched the oldest stars for this signature, they couldn't find it. The answer, it seems, is that it simply is not there. Because the first stars weren't as massive as previously thought, they would have blown up in a manner akin to the types of stellar explosions that we see today.

"I am sure there are more surprises in store for us regarding this exciting period of the universe," said Yorke. "NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be a valuable tool to observe this epoch of early star and galaxy formation."

For technical details and videos visit http://www-tap.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~hosokawa/firststarstop_e.html .

The California Institute of Technology manages JPL for NASA.  More information about JPL is online at www.jpl.nasa.gov .

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

2011-348

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There is no single sexy chin, study shows

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New chart shows the entire topography of the Antarctic seafloor in detail for the first time

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