Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Remember the Voyager Mission? Research Papers Do!



So the objective of my blog this week is to take a research paper from a known source, in my case Science, and try to make that research more available to the public. The two reasons for this are increasing the knowledge on research through the blog as well as increase the audience of not only research topics on space exploration, but of scientific journals in general. Reading articles like these might make you want to pull your hair out, but the results from them are necessary to continue scientific discovery.

Don't get mad, read a science blog!


The following article is titled "Voyager Measurements of Hydrogen Lyman-a Diffuse Emission from
the Milky Way" by Rosine Lallement, Eric Quémerais, Jean-Loup Bertaux, Bill R. Sandel, and Vlad Izmodenov. Now I know this sounds like a mouthful, but when you boil it down, there are some interesting facts that have been discovered. The paper covers some of the data from the Voyager missions. If you are unfamiliar with it, you can read about it on their website here.

Interstellar Mission
The two Voyager satellites are beyond Pluto after 34 years

Hydrogen Lyman-a emissions, hydrogen ionized by ultraviolet radiation, are currently used to study other stars. Now that the Voyager satellites are beyond our solar system's heliosphere, so the authors want to see if these emissions can be studied for our solar system for the first time. Basically, they want to prove for our sun, what has been observed from other stars. The authors believe that the data recovered and analyzed can help improve the way scientists study other stars and low density areas of the galaxy. 

This is a very intense article, and it is not in my area of study. I found the article through my library's database, so I cannot post a link for you. If you would like to read more about Hydrogen Lyman-a emissions compared to other hydrogen emissions, then you are more than welcome to follow the link.

-Taylor Pellerin

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