Today in Outer Space

First, "to boldly go where no man has gone before." (Well,once before.)

Eleven billion miles from Earth, NASA's long-lived Voyager 2 probe, still beaming back data 41 years after its launch in 1977, has finally moved into interstellar space, scientists revealed Monday, joining its sister ship Voyager 1 in the vast, uncharted realm between the stars.

Voyager 2 moved past the boundary of the heliosphere, the protective bubble defined by the sun's magnetic field and electrically charged solar wind, on Nov. 5. The transition was marked by a sharp decline in the number of charged particles detected by the spacecraft's plasma science experiment, or PLS.

The instrument has not detected any signs of the solar wind since then.

Image:  NASA

Via Joe.My.God.

And, in the realm of big bangs:

The news came a few days ago, but on cosmic time scales that’s still hot of the presses: LIGO, the twin instrument gravitational wave detectors, in collaboration with the European VIRGO detector, announced the discovery of four new black-hole collisions, measured in the gravity waves given off by those titanic wrecks.

That’s hot stuff: the report of the first gravity-wave detection came just two years ago, paying off a prediction first made (tentatively) by Albert Einstein almost exactly a century earlier in his general theory of relativity.

In its most compact form the general theory boils down to a single equation, just one short line of symbols. The quip is that in relativity, it all boils down to space and time telling matter and energy where to go, while energy and matter tell spacetime what shape to be. A gravity wave is that joke in action: matter-energy in violent motion jostles spacetime into waves we can, only in the last few years, actually see.

I can't even imagine the scale of these events.