Recently, the Voyager 1 spacecraft made an incredible discovery in interstellar space. The farthest manmade object from Earth, about 24 billion km or 15 billion miles away, detected a mysterious hum that shocked astronomers. This hum was none other than plasma waves, a hot, diffused, and ionized gas composed of electrons stripped away from their atoms. Typically, this gas is known to exist in interstellar space and interact with shockwaves generated by the Sun, creating instabilities in electron motion and generating plasma waves. However, Voyager 1 detected this hum in a region with no significant influence from the Sun, which was surprising. The signal persisted at around 3 kHz. As of 2021, it persisted for almost three years, making it the longest continuous plasma signal recorded by Voyager 1 to date.
This incredible discovery raises many questions about the universe and the possibilities that lie beyond it.
