Is Our Solar System Shaped Like A Croissant? | Universe Explorers | BBC Earth Science 

And no fuel limitations. Or brakes.

Interstellar space is a good destination. A lot can be learned from that.

True but then again 30 years from now the technology is likely to be much better. I'm thinking they're biding their time on these missions until some remarkable breakthrough has been achieved. I'm surprised that we aren't sending out more stuff to every planet all the time but at the end of the day it's about *money*. It's probably hard to even get the funding these days. I'm thinking once we get a big base on our moon or Mars these missions will become a lot more frequent.

The “New Horizons” mission is past Pluto and speeding towards the heliopause.

@@UnexpectedBooks i knew it was a probe sent for pluto and now its ventures towards the kuiper belt. Exploring unknown worlds in this dark distant area of our solar system. If they plan to shoot it out beyond that well thats just fine by me :) i am really fascinated with it all.

@@chamberlain85 Yep. This is the "New Horizons" spacecraft mentioned above. Unfortunately, it does not have an important magnetic instrument on it. It also is limited by its power supply.

The craft itself yes. But it will eventually run out of power and go so far away that even if it did have power, you wouldn't be able to distinguish the signal from background noise.

If it passes close enough to another star its photovoltaic panels may bring it back to life one day 🙂

It's pretty amazing that it has made it this far without hitting anything and is still "functional". With the current course it is heading what's the closest star it might reach and how long would that take assuming it stays intact?

@@huldu If it was heading in the right direction, it would take 75,000 years for Voyager 1 to reach Alpha Centauri, the next nearest star. Space is BIG. It's also extremely empty, both probes will probably still be drifting around the galaxy when our sun dies in 5 billion years.

It's not likely to exit the galaxy. It doesn't have enough speed. It is effectively in orbit around the galactic centre now, like the sun is. And there is will stay for billions of years. In trillions of years, yeah, maybe it'll fly too close to a black hole and get a massive gravitational sling shot out of the galaxy, but equally, in that timeframe it could collide into something... or just keep floating, floating around our galactic centre, for as long as there is a galactic centre.

@@chrisdevine4848 Interesting! I wonder how much speed it needs to have to exit the Galaxy! So Sagittarius A* is the equivalent of the Sun in this example? Pulling Voyager towards it like the Sun pulls the other planets? So maybe in very deep time Voyager will actually fall into Sagittarius A* unless something else extremely unlikely happens?

​@@-_Nuke_- - escape velocity for the galaxy (where we are in it) is about 550km/s (according to google). The sun is orbiting at around 230km/s, and voyager is going about an extra 17km/s faster than that. So basically, it's going half the speed it needs to. The Sgt A* vs Sun analogy doesn't quite work. The Sun represents about 99% the mass of our solar system, with the remaining 1% orbiting it. Take away the sun, and all the planets, etc, would fly off into interstellar space. But Sgt A* represents less than 1% of the total mass of the galaxy. So whilst we (and Voyager) appear to be orbiting it, if you took Sgt A* away, we'd still orbit around everything else left in the galactic centre - i.e. all the the other stars and gas and probably a lot of dark matter too (TBC!). Hence why it's more accurate to say that the sun (and now voyager) orbit the galactic centre, rather than Sgt A*. As for falling in to Sgt A*, Voyager is probably safe. It's almost as hard to fall into the centre of the galaxy as it is to escape it.

@@chrisdevine4848 Thanks so much for this info! Yes it makes sense, we are not really orbiting our black hole but the galactic center... If we extend the time to infinity, wouldn't everything eventually end up inside a black hole? After a very long time, galaxies themselves will come apart, by very long time I mean reaching the heat death of our universe; So stars will either all eventually fall inside the black hole in the center of their galaxy, or they will fly outwards into the nothingness of space... The accelerated expansion of the universe will probably make the latter more probable? But taking infinite time, won't everything eventually fall into some black hole? Or maybe taken infinite time, most black holes will also "die" out emitting hawcking radiation so runaway planets and stars won't have enough time to all fall inside of them? Haha who knows!

Voyagers may outlast our Sub.😢

A lot of those academia types dress odd. Cowboy hat wearing nuclear physicists, pajama wearing astronomers. Modern age,

Nope. Sorry. At that speed they wouldn't have reached Jupiter. With that speed they would have traveled about 403 million kilometers.

@@sigisoltau6073 I was just playing at 35000km/hr and 35 years that they mentioned at the beginning. Apparently, it's failed.

@@abiofficial-ws7pn They used miles per hour. So 35,000 miles per hour would be 56,350 kilometers per hour. Um, are you having hearing issues? Cause it seems to me you've got hearing issues.

​@@sigisoltau6073 Wow you found out about my hearing issues ! You are a sharp fella; you are.

@@abiofficial-ws7pn Well, because of my autism I do notice potential clues to things. Since they used miles per hour and you used kilometers per hour I thought you might have hearing issues. Unless you are, maybe, hopefully, not lying and misrepresenting the information like what flat earthers or space deniers would do.

Hopefully the video gets banned in France

That’s what happens when you invite francophone scientists to join the research 😝 lol Edit.: when she said “croissant” the word basically sailed off her mouth with grace and determination “Itt ees shapt like ah crrrroahsah!”

Oh haw haw (French noises)

🤭

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